


Wolves Dressed as Wolves

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Beauty and the Beast Fusion, Alternate Universe - Coyote Ugly (2000) Fusion, Animal Transformation, Curses, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fantasy, Horror, Los Angeles, M/M, Magical Realism, Mild Gore, Monsters, Sexual Tension, aspiring musician
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:53:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27011551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Once upon a time, Patrick moves to the big city to get famous. It’s nothing like he imagined it would be. Then he stumbles into an internship with Pete Wentz, the label executive everyone refers to as the Beast, and finds out how far down his hunger for stardom—and his humanity—really go.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz, Peterick - Relationship
Comments: 59
Kudos: 55
Collections: Bandom Fairy Tales





	1. I see the way the wolves salivate for me

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the weirdest Coyote Ugly / Beauty and the Beast mash-up you've ever read! I'd like to thank/blame the writing of Angela Carter and Emily Tesh, and the encouragement of [@immoral-crow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySmutterella/pseuds/LadySmutterella) and [@carbonbased000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carbonbased000/pseuds/carbonbased000). Thanks to Crow for the beta and Carbon for the beautiful preview art, which inspired the entire second chapter! More soon, my darlings. Please enjoy!
> 
> [Wolf Songs](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0X5Nbz1xoG5soMVdBjrhDD)

Three days. Three days he’s waited in this lobby, hands sweating around the hard plastic edge of his demo tape, waiting for the big bad wolf to step out of the elevator.

 _Don’t make a deal with the beast,_ is what they say in Patrick’s circles. But who is ‘they’ exactly? His fellow aspiring musicians with hungry eyes, their nicotine-stained steel-stinking callused fingertips trembling, and no one he ever talks to has actually done it. They all just mouth the hollow warning: _Don’t make a deal with the beast_. Everyone knows someone who knows someone with a horror story about this place, but Patrick figures: this is the music biz. You don’t get ahead by being a nice guy. So yeah, the head exec of any label is probably beastly. This is just a case of talent that couldn’t hack it, making up fairy stories to justify being snubbed. 

This is the nicest building lobby Patrick’s ever loitered in. All the chrome chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling glass panels really highlight how he stinks from last night. The furniture is the confusing kind of modern, asymmetrical and white, so he wouldn’t know which is a chair and which is a table or what part of either he should sit on, if he wasn’t too covered in glitter and grime to sit at all. He worked the bar—on the bar—all the way through til close, including hosing out the drunks with grabby hands at 4a.m. and then cleaning the place from top to bottom. There are bars where the dancers don’t have to do the bouncing and the cleaning, but Patrick’s not really a dancer. He doesn’t know what he is, other than a guy who needs to pay for demos.

The same people who say _don’t make a deal with the beast_ say _come to LA and get discovered_. So probably they’re full of shit.

His favorite thing in this lobby—and he’s spent enough hours here this week to have catalogued its features thoroughly—is the giant golden vase spilling over with roses. They’re these huge bloody blooms, frilly fat petals and thick stubby thorns, smelling like sex and death and that blurry border between sacred and profane. Or maybe that’s Patrick. Hard to tell. 

The thing about these roses, though. Three days he’s been here, three sunrises he’s staked out this lobby to intercept the Beast when he transfers between the elevator from the parking garage to the elevator to the executive suites, and no one has come to replace the roses. Nor have they withered. Patrick doesn’t know that much about fancy flowers, but he’s pretty sure plucked blooms should start to show their age after three days. And these are definitely the same roses. On his first day, he reached out to stroke a thorn and it bit deep into his finger, past the callus like it wasn’t even there; the stem still bears the small brown splotch of his blood. 

Time rolls past him, the start of his shift at his daytime diner job creeping closer, and Patrick resigns himself to leaving before the Beast ever shows up. This is a dumb scheme anyway. Stuffing a demo tape in the hand of someone you’ve already mailed six such tapes to is not a winning strategy. He’s been in LA for half a year now, and no one’s even listened to one of his tapes. He should probably just give up. 

Well, fuck it. He wants something beautiful for his trouble. He sets his tape down by the towering vase and grabs the stem of the rose that bit him. They’ve been through a lot together, him and this flower. It will be the only lovely thing in the tiny studio apartment he shares with a Ukranian stranger, who speaks ten words of English and gets callbacks all the time. The rose sinks thorns into his hand, even though he was careful to grab a bare part of the stem, but he doesn’t pull back. Beauty’s meant to hurt.

Rose in hand, Patrick turns to leave. Maybe the florist will enjoy his demo, though it seems a paltry offering in exchange for a rose as perfect as this. He shoulders into the glass revolving door when an amused voice behind him says,

“Stop, thief.”

Patrick does, but the door doesn’t, and he stumbles through an awkward, undignified revolution before spilling back into the lobby, face red. His fist has tightened around the rose and its thorns, which should hurt, but only makes him feel more stubborn. He sticks his chin out like he’s not mortified and says, “It’s just a rose.”

The person standing in the lobby raises hairs all down Patrick’s arms, and his spine too. He’s got black hair, slicked tight to his head and bound in a bun at the back of his neck, and carmel-bronze skin, at least where Patrick can see it beneath his immaculate white suit. His knuckles are tattooed, a dark smear of letters he can’t quite make out. He’s got sunglasses obscuring his eyes, but Patrick feels _seen_ in a visceral way nonetheless, like this man can see through his clothes and his skin and the meat of him, like this man is studying the sticky yellow marrow in the center of his bones.

Patrick shudders with knowing. This, then, is the Beast.

“Oh, is that all it is?” asks the Beast. “Take it, then. But be back here tomorrow morning to pay the price.”

Patrick, honestly, does not need the rose this much. When he opens his hand to drop it, though, the thorns stick in his flesh; it does not fall.

The Beast’s unbearable gaze must catch it, for he laughs. “Are you so unwilling to work for what you want?” He picks up the tape Patrick has left, reads the hand-lettered spine. “Patrick Stump. A musician, I presume?”

Patrick nods. The hairs on his arms have not laid down. His heart is beating so hard it’s nearly louder than the Beast’s voice, and he wants to make a drumbeat out of this feeling; talking to the Beast makes his body into a song. 

“So take the rose, thief-Patrick. Then return to me tomorrow for your first day of work.”

“Work?”

The Beast’s face scrunches in a scowl. “Is there an echo in here? Yes. You will pay for that rose with an internship at Decaydance Records. Four weeks and you’ll have made up what you cost me.”

Patrick is stupid today, so Patrick tongues the air and tastes what he already knows. “You’re Pete Wentz.”

For a second, for a breath, the Beast flicks his sunglasses down. It’s too fast to see even the color of his eyes, but Patrick’s fist spasms tight around the bite of his rose in what can only be called fear. The eyes, he’s sure of it, are the eyes of a lion: big, gold, slit-pupiled, spiked with the inhuman intelligence of a predator.

“Good, you’ve heard of me. That means you know better than to be late.”

And with that he’s gone, whisking into the open mouth of elevator doors and letting them swallow him silently whole.

Patrick’s blood drips on the lobby floor.

“Bottom line: I think it’s a bad idea,” says Joe, whizzing past with a tray of biscuits, gravy, and waffles shaped like the state of Texas. Round ‘Em Up Diner, Patrick’s day job, is one of those inexplicably themed Hollywood joints. He’s wearing a scratchy poly-blend cowboy shirt and a big stupid hat, and he’s dipped his sleeve fringe in grits twice already today. Yee-haw.

“All of this,” Patrick calls after his friend’s back, gesturing to encircle the whole of the diner, the tourists eating in it, his life in general, “is a bad idea.”

Some Disneyland lady with a giant off-brand handbag huffs, personally offended by Patrick’s poor life choices. She picks up one of the bills from her shitty two-dollar tip like that’s supposed to mean something to him. Patrick hates people who put their tip down on the table at the start of the meal, like a couple sweaty bucks in plain syrupy sight puts the fear of god in him and transforms him into the rootin’-est tootin’-est server in town. 

Patrick refills her iced tea anyway, with a big cheesy wink and a drawl of “Ma’am,” before he follows Joe on his path back across the diner into the kitchen. The doors swing shut behind them and the kitchen is thick with the humidity of spitting grease. The kitchen crew is shouting amicably about something, as usual, and Patrick speaks up to be heard over the ruckus of griddles and plates.

“Seriously, Joe. I’m getting out of this one-horse town.” He cracks it like a joke, but honestly, he needs Joe to have his back on this. Something in his gut is nervous-sick about whatever happened with the—at Decaydance Records today. Under the fluorescent lights and unflinching cowboy decor of his day job, he can’t quite get himself to think _the Beast_. He was exhausted, probably drunk from the liquor fumes of the night before. He didn’t see what he saw, didn’t feel what he felt. Couldn’t have. And if Joe says he’s doing the right thing, leaving this shit job for a career-making opportunity at a major label, well, Patrick might even believe it.

Joe crosses his arms over his empty tray and aims at Patrick with a finger-gun. “Listen, pardner,” he says, because if Rudy-the-middle-manager catches them out of character, he’ll remind them how _every wide-eyed no-talent kid who stumbled out of the Midwest wants this job_ , and honestly who has the energy for that. “We’ve both heard the same stories. If you’re tired of the spurs, get out of the saddle.” Joe shrugs a little, a silent apology for the cowboy nonsense. “But I’m not gonna say it’s a safe bet. How are you going to pay rent without this job?”

Patrick thinks about the rose, which through some trick of sunrise was _glowing_ when he left it in his locker in back and changed into his unwashed cowboy uniform. He doesn’t think his landlord will be impressed. He shrugs in the face of Joe’s logic. “I can do more shifts at the Coyote. Me and Anatoliy can get another roommate. I don’t know, man, I just—this morning Pete Wentz held my demo tape in his _hand_. Now I’m in a polyester cowboy hat. There’s no way out of a job like this, not really.”

Joe’s face tugs into a grin under his Lone Ranger mask. He shoves Patrick’s shoulder gently. “Gonna miss you around these parts, buddy. Don’t forget me when you’re famous.”

Patrick grins back. He figures that’s close enough to Joe’s approval. Besides, hearing himself say the words made them true, the opposite of wishing: there’s no way out of a job like this, except the opportunity Pete Wentz just gave him. A magic rose, a door opening in the impassable hedge, a dangerous Beast with the eyes of a lion. Comes a time in life when a man’s got to close his eyes and leap.

Compared to that white suit, anything in Patrick’s closet will leave him hopelessly underdressed, so he tries to make it look intentional, Pacific Northwest cool. He puts on dark jeans, an old t-shirt from a folk rock tour, a clean flannel shirt, and a dark brown sport coat. He doesn’t have a mirror in his 400 sq ft studio, but Anatoliy jerks his head in a nod when Patrick asks if he looks all right.

He sweats so much on the Metro, he hopes the extra layers muffle the stink. Why is it that fear sweat smells so sharp and vulnerable? Everyone will know the second he walks in that Patrick’s afraid of the big bad wolf. He gets off the train downtown, one of the stations with ornate murals and old subway tokens pressed into the ceiling like the glittering gold mosaics of a cathedral. It’s one of those everyday Los Angeles enchantments, magic that couldn’t come true anywhere else, the photo negative inverse of the dull, utilitarian grime of a Chicago El platform. He walks through a corridor of traffic and palm trees and he’s in the shadow of the Decaydance building before he decides if he really has the guts to go inside. His palm throbs once with the memory of rose-wound as he walks past his rose’s sisters, and when he presses the elevator button with a hand that does tremble, the doors whisper open to reveal the Beast.

He’s so close that Patrick takes an involuntary step back. The Beast grins, pleased. He’s dressed in casual black today, black jeans, black v-neck, black jacket, and Patrick looks like a disgruntled record store employee in comparison. His sunglasses keep his eyes a mystery, and even though they’re too close for comfort, Patrick still can’t quite make out the tattooed letters twined over his skin.

“It’s good you have enough sense not to break your word,” Pete says by way of greeting. “Or is it not enough sense? Either way, consequences could be terrible. Come, step inside. We’ve work to do, and you are late.”

Patrick’s inside the elevator before he decides to take a step. The Beast has a way of compulsion about him. Patrick feels like he hasn’t made a decision since the first word Pete spoke to him, he’s just followed the tether of the irresistible to its natural conclusion. The door closes and he’s alone with that natural conclusion, Pete’s wolfy smile and expensive scent. Patrick’s tongue is too big for his mouth.

Instead of anything that could be mistaken as professional, Patrick sputters out, “Did you listen to my tape?”

Pete’s whole face is as flat and impassive as his sunglasses. Patrick feels the prickle of blood filling his face, rose petals rising in his cheeks. “My assistant will show you to your desk. You will get my caterer on the phone and confirm this evening’s order, we are entertaining advertisers with _gluten_ allergies for some fucking reason. Then you will accompany me on a cover shoot. You will spend your afternoon reviewing agented submissions, and by tomorrow morning I want three sample pop hooks we can use with my artists. You are familiar with the label’s discography, I presume. Scylla will manage the phones but you’re on emails, and I want same-day responses for all inquiries.”

Patrick wishes he was taking notes. “Um,” he says intelligently. “What?”

The Beast’s nostrils flare in a perfectly still face. “What have you heard about me, thief-Patrick?” he asks. Somehow this question shows almost all his teeth. They are bright and white and many. Patrick can’t quite tell if they are pointed or smooth.

“There’s not really a... fair way to answer that question,” Patrick evades.

“Ah.” The elevator doors ding open at the penultimate floor. “Think very hard, then, Mr. Stump, if you’ve heard anything that suggests I am the type of man who repeats himself.” Patrick is sweating, if possible, even more profusely than he was on the subway.

“Um,” he says.

“What are you waiting for?” the Beast asks, with the barest hint of a growl. Every single one of Patrick’s hairs stands at attention. He lifts his hand as if to touch Patrick between the shoulders, ushering him out. Patrick swears he can feel the displaced air hit his back, the ache between potential and realization, where the idea of a touch can live or die. 

Patrick steps out of the elevator as if in a trance. The Beast’s face is expressionless as the doors close between them and the elevator departs, rushing towards a kingdom with gates impassable to Patrick.

Pete’s assistant, by all accounts, is a well-groomed human woman with no more than the usual amount of heads, and Patrick’s eyes perceive the finer details of her without difficulty. This is a good sign, probably.

His desk is small, black lacquer with gold accents, the sleek computer and conference phone taking up all available space. No room for personal effects, or personality: elegance made possible by obscuring existence. His clothes are shabbier than ever as he sits behind it. 

“So, Courtney, what’s the deal with this job?” he asks the assistant, because she’s standing there waiting for him to log in to the computer so she can set up his password, and this is as good a chance as any of learning more about the Beast. 

“ _I_ have a job,” she enunciates crisply. “ _You_ have an internship. And you will call me Ms. Cogs.”

Midwest friendly, Patrick shows his warmest smile. “You can just call me Patrick.”

“I really don’t plan to call you at all,” Ms. Cogs says. “I realize it’s confusing that Mr. Wentz is taking _you_ around to meetings and events today instead of one of his actual, competent, paid employees, so let me explain things to you. You are a plaything to him. You will entertain him only til he plays too rough and you break. Then, once you’re not so pretty anymore, Mr. Wentz’s interest will fail, and you’ll be back to wherever it is you belong.” She sniffs coldly and adds, “With luck, I’ll have forgotten you were ever here by the end of the week.”

Patrick’s mouth drops open. He knows Hollywood is competitive, didn’t expect the record industry to be a cakewalk, but _jeez_. “You don’t have to be mean about it,” he mutters to his desk. 

“Mean?” Cogs blinks, considering. “No, I rather think it would be meaner to let you get comfortable, all puppy-dog eager, and pretend like you’ll be staying. But you’ll form your own opinion, I’m sure. Do wipe the glitter off your desk before you leave tonight, won’t you?”

Patrick jerks his hands back from the mirror-black surface. Yes, there—three lime-green specks of iridescence. He scrubbed himself raw this morning, assuming that if he removed his top four layers of skin he would surely eradicate any lingering glitter. He was the shyest person he knew, in Chicago. In Los Angeles he leaves glitter on everything he touches, a drunk pixie, because no amount of scrubbing is enough to remove the Coyote from his skin. The club and what he does there is a stain that may never come off.

His eyes burn with shame and he juts his chin out proud, as if readying it for the executioner’s block. He will not give Cogs the satisfaction of looking away, so he stares right at her, his vision swimming her into a well-dressed blur. “Thank you for the advice,” he says proudly. Louder than his own words he hears that familiar warning. _Don’t make a deal with the Beast._ The desktop initializes at last, the computer before him chiming its willingness to serve, and Cogs has no more reason to stand over him in judgment.

“Well, let me know if you need anything,” Cogs says, plainly meaning the opposite. Patrick refuses to cry at his desk simply because people in the Hollywood record industry, at a notoriously beastly label, are _mean_. Instead he shall have to prove her wrong. Can’t be too much harder than dancing on a sticky bar while strangers grope you, and god knows he’s good at that.

Patrick’s plan—write hooks so good, the Beast is stunned by his talent, and he gets a record deal all to himself before that stolen rose ever dies—turns out to have one major flaw in it. The flaw is Pete. If Patrick was under the impression that having a desk and a list of specific tasks to accomplish at said desk meant he’d have any time at all to sit and work, he is quickly disabused of that notion. Pete needs him every five minutes. 

Skype for Business pings begin pouring him the moment he sets up his Decaydance email account, like the Beast has been staring into his magic mirror awaiting the moment a green dot illuminated beside the name _Stump, Patrick_. 

First it’s _did Cogs tell you how I take my coffee yet? I need some_. Ten minutes after Patrick has delivered coffee to Pete’s empty desk, it’s _this is cold. Go to starbucks for me and get something better._

Then when Patrick reascends to the top floor, coffee in hand and wrestling with his scowl because he usually does this kind of work while pretending to be a daytime cowboy, the Beast meets him outside the elevator doors. “Where have you been?” Pete snaps. “We’ll be late to the shoot. Don’t make me wait again.”

Patrick is so irked, he doesn’t stop to think. He pulls the tab out of Pete’s coffee and fills his mouth with scalding latte. Then he smiles with a burnt tongue and hands the cup to the most feared man in the modern music industry. “Yep, this should be hot enough for you,” he says.

Whatever the Beast thinks of this, Patrick can’t tell, not with sunglasses between them. He can’t believe himself, except he’s always had a temper. Not even cowboy customer service has stamped it out of him. So yeah. He can believe it. 

The Beast fits his mouth over the mark left by Patrick’s, sips carefully. He makes a sound in his throat that could be a hum of pleasure, could be a growl. Patrick stares straight ahead at the elevator doors, refuses to let himself blink.

Here’s the thing they leave out of fairy tales. Sometimes the little pig opens the door because the Big Bad Wolf is actually charming. Sometimes you look at the Big Bad Wolf and something nameless in you recognizes yourself in those glistening fangs. Maybe it’s just scraps of the last fool eaten by him, stuck between incisor and gum, you recognize; maybe it’s the fangs themselves, that ferocity of potential. Sometimes he knocks politely on your door and there’s no mention of huffing and puffing. Sometimes you’re in your nightgown and a dark vicious stranger is just what you’re craving in your bed.

Here’s the thing about the Beast. Standing beside him in an elevator, smelling his obscene scent, Patrick gets goosebumps. He’s hypnotized as he was by the rose. He aches to feel thorns catch in his skin. _Oh, I love the way you hurt me. It’s irresistible_.

Pete’s lips hitch in the smallest smile, licking coffee from the corner of his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye, Patrick would swear he glimpses the glitter of a fang. He feels drunk on proximity, on nerves, on lack of sleep. He needs to get out of this elevator. By the time the doors open underground, Patrick practically stumbles into the parking garage.

He can feel the Beast watching him, sipping his oversweet coffee without comment, and he wants to deserve it. Whatever Pete saw in him that got him here—Cogs’ words burn in his ears—Patrick wants to be it. Wildly he thinks, if Pete wants to use him up, that’s what he wants too.

A car chirps, unlocking ahead of them. Patrick hesitates beside the passenger door of the Beast’s oh-so-appropriate inky black Jaguar til Pete rolls down the window and says, “Do you need me to hold the door for you? Get in.” 

There is a moment of dumb, drowsy clarity, with the thick metal of the car between them. He catches a glimmer of himself wrapped in a snake’s slowly tightening coils, vaguely perceives a venom so sweet no one could mind it, even as it rifled through blood vessels and tore up the heart. There is peril here, even if he’s too sluggish to see it. But the window opens, carrying the scent of rot and rose, and that awareness does not fade so much as become irrelevant. If this is what venom feels like, he wants his veins full of it.

Patrick slips into cushioned leather seats that receive him like a tongue. The Beast uncoils the sleek car into motion, driving them up out of the darkness and into the blinding sun. 

Terrible, fatuous, and irresistible. Describe Pete Wentz in 3 words or less. Patrick barely knows who he is at the end of his first day. Pete deposits him back at his lower-level desk after whirlwind hours of charming, contradictory demands, parading him around in front of artists and cameramen, meetings clearly above his paygrade, and frantic scribbled notes that exceeded Patrick’s palm and crawled up his arm to the elbow before Pete noticed he didn’t have paper and tossed him a crumpled stack of sticky notes, warm from his jacket’s breast pocket.

He hasn’t had time to take a breath all day, dizzy-sick on the carnal, botanic smell of the Beast, let alone compose the kind of brilliant hooks that will turn Pete’s passing fancy into Patrick’s big break. And—the late hour swirls across his computer’s screensaver, a glorified clock for all that he’s used it today—he has to be in West Hollywood for his shift at the Coyote in two hours.

He’s not sure yet when he’s going to sleep, with this new schedule. Or shower. Or eat. But the bigger problem tonight is when he’s going to write Pete’s songs. Well—it won’t be the first time he’s the weirdo on the Metro singing to himself. It’s a good way to have a whole bench to yourself, anyway. 

It doesn’t make sense to go all the way home just to turn around and come back to this part of town, but Patrick does it anyway. He rationalizes that he needs to change clothes, even though someone at the Coyote could surely lend him something. He doesn’t tell himself the real reason.

His train thunders beneath Los Angeles and Patrick closes his eyes, feeling for a melody in between his ear buds and his brain. He pulls out the cell phone he can’t really afford and starts thumbing beats into his cracked keyboard. There is such restlessness in him, an ache he can’t explain. He thinks maybe it has always been here, some latent craving in his blood that wakes now, when he is so close. There is magic in what he can do with music, always has been. If he can just push what he feels deep enough into the sound—if he can get it into the ear of the Beast, before Cogs’ shuddering prediction comes true—

No pressure, Patrick reminds himself. (He is never not sweaty.) No pressure at all. 

He’s still singing to himself when he unlocks the three deadbolts and steps into the tiny studio. They have a window, technically, a grimy two-foot alley-facing rectangle near the ceiling. It’s always dark in here, with no real ventilation for the heavy blood-broth smell of Anatoliy’s constant cooking. What that man can accomplish with a hot plate is its own kind of magic, though not an overly appetizing one. Usually Patrick can churn out hooks like it’s his job—he wants it to be his job—but his blood is buzzing too loud, won’t settle. He’s got the edge of something he likes, maybe, gnawing at his ear, and he wishes he could sit down and figure it out. But there’s no time. 

He removes Anatoliy’s drying laundry from the tiny shower cubicle and starts the water. He’s got ten minutes to shower, change, and get back on the train. His time, his life, it’s not really his. It’s never felt more obvious than it does tonight. Everybody owns a part of him but him.

Naked, shower running, Patrick is somehow standing in front of his rose instead of under the water. It’s a surprise to him to discover this, this is the real reason he came all the way home. He reaches for it, then just stands there, arm extended and fingers hovering above petals. It must be sunset sneaking in through that grimy window, because the rose is doing it again. Glowing. The petals are the red of peach flesh, limned in gold. Patrick’s scabbed-over thorn puncture pulses, like there’s gold sealed inside his skin. He still doesn’t know why three days in a row, he stood in the lobby of Pete’s tower next to this flower, then reached out without deciding to and took it for his own. He doesn’t know why he longs to feel its bite now. He can’t explain—

His phone rings, sudden and aggressive, and Patrick startles out of his trance. The melody that had been at the edge of his brain, he can hear it whole now. He grabs a scrap of envelope and a pencil, scribbling the notes of the song even as he answers the phone.

“‘Lo?” he says, keeping his syllables minimal so it doesn’t throw off his flow.

“Patrick. I need you tonight,” the last voice he ever expected to hear slithers out of the phone.

“I—um,” Patrick wishes he had some clothes on. He blushes fifteen colors. He can’t believe Cogs was right, and the Beast is already assailing his virtue. “I have work.”

“I don’t care,” dismisses Pete. “We’re scouting a band I might sign. I need your ear on it.”

 _You can’t possibly need some shitty intern you just met and know nothing about_ , a sensible person would say. _I can’t miss a shift at the Coyote and still pay my rent,_ someone else who is also sensible. _This is an inappropriate last-minute request,_ still another sensible soul. Definitely none of those people would feel the smallest curl of disappointment in their belly that the Beast is not calling for sex after all.

Patrick’s not that kind of guy. Really. He’s not. It’s just—there’s something about the animal _nearness_ of Pete, the way Patrick’s blood gets caught in a thrill somewhere between arousal and terror. It makes Patrick wish, just a little bit, that he was that kind of guy. It makes Patrick want to pretend he could be. Just for one night.

And it probably wouldn’t hurt his pursuit to get a record deal, either. Right?

“I can’t,” Patrick hears himself say, and he’s as surprised as anyone he’s able to refuse. At times it seems the Beast has a _geas_ on him, that he must comply with any request, even if it’s something stupidly about coffee, an area of apparently bottomless discontent for the Beast (e.g., ‘this latte doesn’t have enough foam,’ followed by ‘what is this, a cappuccino? Is it too much to ask for a rational amount of foam on a latte? Scrape this off’).

“Can’t,” Pete growls, and his visceral disapproval raises hairs on Patrick’s naked arms. His arm hair is not, Patrick is horrified to report, the only part of his body that responds to that growl. 

“I’ll see you at work tomorrow goodbye,” Patrick rushes out, before his suddenly alert dick can bloom into a fully humiliating boner, then hangs up his phone and turns it off for good measure. The hot water’s gone by the time he gets in the shower, and he figures that should kill his treacherous arousal, only it doesn’t. Patrick jerks himself off, uncomfortable and unhappy, and hopes whatever he does-or-does-not feel for the Beast swirls down the drain with his embarrassing come. He’s still struggling into his skintight, mostly mesh work clothes as he runs out the door, wet hair dripping into his eyes. He’s going to be late for work, he didn’t have time to finish his song, his stomach rumbles with unsated hunger, and even after masturbating, there’s an uncomfortable tightness in his groin. He’s so crabby about all of this, he doesn’t notice that behind him, in the dull sunset of his apartment, a single petal has fallen from the rose.

His second day is the same as the first. The Beast issues an incessant stream of demands that keep Patrick’s ass from touching the seat of his chair for more than one contiguous minute; Patrick’s whole body stiffens and prickles whenever the Beast is near him, dick included; and the animal smell of Pete’s skin paralyzes him, locked between nausea and lust, like a poison building in his blood, getting stronger with each contact. He has no time to compose, let alone answer emails. He forgets to breathe when Pete’s jacket sleeve brushes his bare skin in the elevator. He can’t tell, with the sunglasses, but he keeps getting the feeling Pete is staring at his neck.

And when the Beast _doesn’t_ need him—those rare moments when he’s in a meeting or otherwise preoccupied—Patrick finds himself lingering outside Pete’s office door, itching to knock upon it with some contrived project or demand. He feels it physically, when the Beast’s attention is not on him. It feels like the sun burning out. 

By lunchtime, he’s starting to feel like he’s in the clear, that the Beast won’t mention Patrick’s unavailability last night and it won’t hurt his internship standing, spoil his shot at fame. But feeling safe in the company of the Beast should always be a klaxon of alarm. Pete requests Patrick’s company over lunch, just the two of them in the large top-floor boardroom, which is windows on two sides and framed gold and platinum records on the others. 

The Beast insists Patrick sample his bloody steak salad and then, while Patrick’s mouth is full of thick, lurid meat, says, “I usually don’t enjoy hearing the word ‘no,’ but there was something—curious that happened, when you refused me last night. My pulse quickened, I thought with displeasure, but it was something else. Do you know what I felt?”

Patrick’s mouth is full of iron and it may as well be his own heart he’s chewing, the bands of muscle in the meat too rare to part beneath his teeth. He shakes his head, not daring to speak. He is using all of his control not choking on this dead mouthful, spitting the tang of old blood out.

“I liked it. In a way I cannot explain I liked it. I think I would very much like to cause you to say it again.”

Patrick tries to believe this is workplace assertiveness training, but the Beast’s words are heavy with tension and sexual dread. Patrick forces himself, somehow, to swallow the huge lump of steak salad, desperately thinking of anything other than whether it’s a human or animal dick inside the Beast’s crisply ironed pants.

Pete lowers his sunglasses then, and Patrick is startled to see amber-brown beneath. No sickly gold of a lion’s eye, no slit of a predator’s pupil. Just brown, human, round-pupiled eyes, gleaming with surprising warmth.

“What do you say, rose thief?” Somehow, the heat of those human eyes on him makes Pete’s voice a purr, rubbing up his skin with the velvet scrape of a tiger’s tongue. “Will you say no to me again?”

Patrick’s addled brains scramble, trying to come up with a response that isn’t a flirtation. _Yes_ is insouciant, promising; _no_ is defiantly sexual, overt. With his own fork he leans in and spears another piece of that abhorrently thick meat, fills his mouth to buy himself time. His eyes burn and his skin thrills-or-crawls with unshielded eye contact with the Beast. He works his teeth deep into flesh and shrugs one shoulder, like he couldn’t care less. “You’ll find out,” he says, and Pete smiles slow, showing the serration of teeth.

“I liked hearing that too,” he says in that horrible, sensual purr. Patrick struggles with the carnage on his tongue, his mouth flooding with sudden saliva and the taste of carrion, and he can no longer tell whether he’s horny or scared.

After lunch, he finds Ms. Cogs. She does not look happy to see him.

“You said that before me, there were others,” Patrick blurts out, not waiting for her to acknowledge him, because he suspects she might simply look through him for the rest of the afternoon.

“ _You’re_ still here,” she says, the pronoun curdling in her mouth.

“It’s your lucky day,” Patrick tosses back. He doesn’t have the patience. “The other interns, Cogs. What can you tell me about them? Do I know any of their names?”

Courtney Cogs tips her head at him, confusion giving her brow the slightest wrinkle. A lock of mahogany hair escapes her severe cap of hair and curls down her forehead, inquisitive. It’s the first time he’s ever caught her attention.

“I’m not going to help you,” she says.

“That is not the new, surprising information you may think it is.”

“But I’m not going to lie to you either. That’s what I’ve decided. I am perfectly neutral about you. The playthings that preceded you were nobodies, Patrick. No one noticed or cared what happened to them, so anything and everything did.”

The wording on that is fairy-tale tricky. Patrick pushes. “Some of them made it, didn’t they? Some of them put out records with the—with Pete.”

Cogs’ mouth turns down. “Yes, you probably know some of their names,” she concedes sourly. “But don’t think you’re one of them. The list of people Mr. Wentz has used up, cast aside, and forgotten is longer than you are tall. He’s a monster just like you’ve heard. He cannot love. And soon enough you’ll run afoul of his—” Cogs mouths the word _claws_ dramatically, raking her fingernails through the air as if to demonstrate.

“One name,” he pleads, trying to look unmoved by the prospect of claws, neither frightened nor longing. “Give me one name to get me started. If he’s as bad as you say, getting me in deeper isn’t really helping, right? It’s neutral?”

“Even if you fall the rest of the way down the mountain yourself, the first push is not neutral. My advice is, you leave here tonight, you put this place far behind. You never return. You forget. Two days, you may yet be able to. But after three days…” Cogs moves her legs under her desk, and Patrick can’t tell if he’s imagining the creak of chains, the heavy drag of shackles. He looks down and sees only her small, pale feet in sharp-heeled red-bottomed shoes.

Even if she’s trapped in a tower, she’s no princess. He’s not here to rescue anyone, not even if himself. Patrick decides it’s enough, knowing there are names to discover; he can dig through Decaydance archives and dig into the rumors that circulate about this place. Cogs has given him a place to start.

As he’s leaving her, Cogs tells his back, “Once upon a time, before the Beast was the Beast, someone was the first.”

Patrick listens, but he doesn’t turn back.

Tonight he’s in the pleather pants, the tight black tank top. For most of his life, he’d have said he’d never be caught dead in an outfit like this, but now he lives in LA and not only wears red pleather, but climbs up on the bar and sprays people with carbonated water from the soda gun, yelling, “Do I make you thirsty?!”

The surprising thing isn’t Patrick dancing on the bar at the Coyote, though. The surprising thing is how much fun he has doing it.

Tonight he’s working the floor, mostly. He’s on a mission to follow gossip, coax whispers into taking form. He’s here tonight to get names.

He leans over a booth in a smoky corner of the club, hinged at the waist to show his ass at its best advantage, flirts and pushes and purrs. “Sure, everyone _says_ to stay away from Decaydance,” he laughs like a nonbeliever, “but does anyone actually know someone who’s had a bad experience? Like, Pete Wentz isn’t _literally_ a beast. Hollywood isn’t a fairy tale.” 

All night, no one’s been talking, but this guy seems to like Patrick too much to stop. He catches on the word _beast_ like a record skipping and his eyes dart side to side, but he leans closer to Patrick. “Then how do you explain us meeting like this?” 

This guy, he’s got to be in his late forties. He’s got salt-and-pepper hair and Buddy Holly glasses and he’s way too handsome to be picking up bartenders at the Coyote, so there’s a good chance he’s a washed-up one-hit wonder or, like, a serial killer, or something like that. Patrick straightens up, frowning in disinterest. If cheesy Taylor Swift pick-up lines are all this guy has got, he’s going to take care of his other tables.

“I’m just saying, I’m not gonna act like he’s some big bad wolf if no one can even give me _one name_ of someone who’s been screwed,” Patrick says. He tilts his hips and chin away from the guy, saying with his body language _last chance to keep me interested_ , making his mouth drag on the word _screwed_ to keep this guy where he wants him. He tries not to feel bad about being a hussy. Even James Bond flirts to get information sometimes.

“Okay, you didn’t hear this from me, right?” the guy caves at last. “I’ve been in the industry a long time and I’ve heard a lot of rumors. I hear he’s the kind of guy who promises anything to get what he wants, and then casts people aside when he’s tired of fucking them. But worse than that is the ones he doesn’t get tired of. He ties them up in record deals like golden chains, so he owns them, gets richer and richer while the artist’s cut gets eaten up by studio and management fees.”

Patrick’s shaking his head, takes a step back. “I told you I don’t believe in fairy tales. Pete Wentz is just the monster under my bed until there are actual _people_ this has happened to.”

Annoyance, now, on the customer’s face. He reaches out and grabs the pen out of Patrick’s little apron, and writes words on a damp napkin. _Smith Saporta Vecchio Way Simpson_. Beneath them, he writes another—and then, fast as if the pen is possessed, he scribbles it out in thick black lines, thorn bushes choking out the view of a castle. All that’s left is a spiky _H_. “There. A cornucopia of the utterly fucked. Now will you sit down with me and have a drink?” He pats the booth next to him, scoots to make room, smiles in a way he must think is charming, and awaits his reward.

Patrick slips the napkin and his pen back into his apron. “Wish I could,” he says with a wink, “but I’ve got other tables.” 

And he casts the guy aside, his uses exhausted, exactly like they say Pete Wentz would do.

The next night he calls out of work because Pete tells him to. Instead of going to the Coyote, he gets in Pete’s car and they drive out to Pasadena, to scout talent in a bar with sticky floors and a Western theme, because what seedy bar in Southern California doesn’t have a Western theme. The ‘stage’ is really just a back room with a pool table pushed out of the way, and the band fits right in, with mismatched equipment and clothes worse than Patrick’s. It seems an unlikely spot for discovering anything other than tomorrow morning’s headache, but even Patrick can afford $3 for a stag and a shot of whiskey, so hey.

Patrick is always very aware of the position of Pete’s body, the negative space outlined between their aching forms. Tonight he is aware especially of Pete’s eyes on his throat as he tosses back his shot. Pete’s got his sunglasses on, of course, but Patrick no longer needs to see the Beast to feel him. Lion-yellow iris, no white, slit pupil, Pete watches his Adam’s apple move. They both think about other things Patrick might swallow.

Neither of them says _I know what you are_. But they both do.

When the music starts, mostly on key and entirely forgettable, the Beast leans close. “I want to confess to you.”

Every hair follicle, taste bud, and blood cell in Patrick’s body stands at attention. “I’ll receive your confession,” he says. He can feel Pete’s breath on his skin, hot as slaughter.

“I didn’t bring you here because this is a good band,” comes that voice in his ear. Chocolate melting in the sun, that’s how it feels.

“Why did you bring me here?” Patrick’s whole body is heartbeat, rigid and throbbing. He prays for the answer just the same as he dreads it. He is the word _please_.

“To do this.” Pete grins his Big Bad Wolf best and captures Patrick by the hand, drags him out onto what passes for a dance floor. Patrick feels needle-fine claw tips opening tiny holes in his skin. His blood rushes to meet the Beast with the same eagerness as the rest of him. In a bar in Pasadena where no one will recognize him, Pete crushes Patrick to his chest and they dance.

Pete doesn’t kiss him.

Patrick goes to Decaydance during his days, dances or composes during his nights, and aches for Pete’s touch during all of it. The rose pulses neon-bright like tree frog poison on his tiny windowsill. He fills Pete’s inbox with a passion of song hooks, a fury of melody, and hears nothing back. They spend all day together but he dares not ask. The weeks of his internship are dwindling, he’s wasting his chance at fame, yet all he can think of is the Beast. He rubs the pad of his thumb over the tiny pinhead pearls of scabs on his hand from where Pete grabbed it and digs into his research on the list of names, the list of bodies left like breadcrumbs, leading to he knows not what. Mostly all he finds is beautiful, aloof Hollywood socialites with meteoric music careers. It’s not much of a warning.

And Pete doesn’t kiss him. And Patrick can’t explain why he sees a Beast out of the corner of his eye and a human man straight on.

And day by day, petals begin to fall from the rose.

“Obsessed, that’s what you are.” Joe meets him at his apartment with breakfast, because Joe is a good friend; Joe waits til his mouth is full of greasy bagel sandwich to nag him, because Joe is also a bad friend. Joe is a complex individual.

“M’not,” Patrick manages without dignity, causing egg yolk to drip down his chin. “M’ just being—realistic.”

Joe blinks at him over his lox bagel. “I didn’t realize the point of this _get discovered dick-first and make it big_ scheme was realism.”

Patrick gets chills, literally, anytime the prospect of Pete and his dick meet in the same thought or sentence. It’s like each day in proximity to Pete, he gets dumber, drunker on the beauty of the Beast. It’s more delicious, knowing what the Beast must intend for him. His daydreams are like fevers, leaving him sweaty, delirious, spent. He never knew before that lust could ache like inevitability, feeling so much like dread. When he sleeps—not enough—he dreams of being devoured. Thorns or claws or powerful jaws rake up and down his skin. A great red maw yawns, a tongue like velvet, and he lets himself be swallowed; he climbs between colossal teeth, lays down on the tongue, and cries out in ecstasy as he sinks in.

“ _Dude_.” Joe’s fingers snap in his face and Patrick comes back from far away. There is a small waterfall of egg on his chin, or else he’s just drooling. “This is what I’m saying. Since you started this internship, all you talk about is Pete Wentz and what he’s going to do to you and whether it will make you famous. You write songs instead of sleeping—”

“Did that anyway,” Patrick points out.

“Well, spending all your free time researching Decaydance stars like a stalker is new. We both know you can’t afford all the data you’ve been using on your phone. How are you even going to pay rent this month?”

Patrick actually is finding realism to be pretty uncomfortable right now. “I’m figuring it out,” he snaps, though he’s not. He’s been a Decaydance intern for a few weeks now, and already his tips at the Coyote have been cut in half as he gains the reputation of _dancing bartender who badgers customers about men more powerful and attractive than they are_ , which kind of ruins the experience. It’s hard to stir himself to care. Not when he can relive a thousand tiny interactions from each day, times the Beast nearly touched him or showed the smallest corner of his teeth, times Patrick was positive he was looking at a sharp-fanged, lion-eyed monster stacked up against time times Patrick was positive he was looking at a man, how it felt when they danced, the way his name sounds in the Beast’s mouth, the way his whole body stiffens and aches as the Beast engineers situations in which Patrick must say _no_ , the throbbing awareness that one of these times, Patrick’s last resolve will crumble, and instead he will say _yes_ —and the terrible, ecstatic wondering what happens once he says it.

“Here, look,” Patrick says, because he can’t put his experiences lately into words but he doesn’t want Joe to worry, because even though he suspects something bad is happening to him, he desperately wants it to. He crosses the tiny studio apartment in two steps and picks up the empty wine bottle he’s stuck the rose in. “What do you see when you look at this?”

“A flower?” Joe’s eyebrows orbit incredulous above his forehead. He looks like a fucking cartoon character.

“Okay, yes, what else do you see? Does it look like other flowers you’ve seen?”

Sunrise again, because Patrick seems to live at the thresholds, the crossing-over point where it’s neither day nor night, tomorrow nor yesterday, perpetually gold and violet and grey. The cool grey of a smoggy dawn parts around sharp rays of carmine, coral, and rose, and the rose is blood in this light, it’s a vital organ, fat and fleshy and very much living for all that it had to be cut almost a month ago. It’s hard to imagine the bush or vine that could have borne such a bloom, harder still to imagine this perfect rose had siblings. It seems too fine to coexist in a universe with any other roses. The petals under breaking daylight seem to glitter, softer than skin, and its smell is funerary and troubling sweet, so rich it fills up your nostrils, then your lungs, then your capillaries, til you may as well drown in it, this undeniable ocean of scent that batters against your every promontory. 

Joe’s hand hovers, frozen in the act of reaching, because to truly behold this rose is to be equal parts enchanted and repulsed. Patrick relaxes something he hadn’t known was tense. _Joe sees it too_. He’s not crazy, not entirely. Not if the rose reaches exploratory tendrils to grip at Joe, the same as it’s perforated Patrick with enough thorns that he can no longer move, pinned and prisoner, pierced so that his trickling blood might feed the soil.

“It’s dying,” Joe says, his voice soft with the pain of it. Patrick follows his gaze and sees he’s right. The rose has a bald spot, now, showing through to the mealy white ovule beneath. Five petals, leached of all color but rot-brown, are damp and dead on the windowsill. As many petals as he has names on a napkin, Patrick thinks, as if trying to understand magic is to undo it, as if the way to break any spell is simply to learn the way it’s cast.

Or it’s just a rose, a remarkable one, cut long ago and dropping petals at last. Patrick takes the wine bottle gingerly from Joe and replaces it on the scummy little windowsill. “I got this rose from the lobby at Decaydance. The Beast caught me stealing it and told me I would work for him to clear my debt. I have less than two weeks left to get noticed by him, Joe. This is my chance, and it’s a better one than most kids who come out here get. If there’s a price associated with that, I’m prepared to pay it.”

“The Beast?” Joe echoes, sounding spacey from the rose. He takes a massive, fortifying bite of schmear and lox and begins to sound more like himself again. “Are you telling me you’re going to have sex with this guy to get famous? If you can’t get him to notice your music, you’ll get him to notice your body? That’s your actual _plan_?”

Patrick shrugs, making eye contact with his breakfast sandwich. The bites he’s eaten sit heavy in his stomach. His appetite is pretty much gone. Mortal food from the mortal world, he thinks nonsensically; the opposite of the rare bits of meat and bursting overripe fruit he’s been eating off Pete’s plate. 

“I’m going on a trip this weekend,” says Patrick. “A research mission. That guy crossed out the name, but the imprint was still on the other folds of the napkin. I think it says _Hurley_ , and when I cross-referenced that with Pete Wentz, I found—” 

He stops short of saying what he actually found: a ruin. The other names led to destruction too, as often as not; the wreckage of personal lives, drug addiction, tabloid-type Icarus stories with dramatic, copy-selling burn-outs. But Hurley led to something different. References scrubbed from websites but still burned into archived copies of pages, rare copies of magazines and a rumored vinyl or two still retained by a few secretive collectors. A ghostly breadcrumb trail of veiled mentions, and nothing about Decaydance at all. The name Hurley led to something that came before. There’s a long list of people devoured prettily by the Beast, but maybe only one name who wasn’t.

“I’m going to find out what I found,” Patrick says. It’s the closest thing to the truth he can pronounce. “Come with me?”

He doesn’t say _make sure I come back. Make sure there’s a road I can follow back out of the woods that leads home again._

Maybe that’s why Joe says, “Can’t. I’ve gotta work your Round ‘Em Up shifts, remember? You didn’t give notice. We’re crazy understaffed.”

Maybe if Patrick said the real reason, Joe would drop everything and come with him, a knight in a fairy tale. Or maybe Joe wouldn’t. Maybe the rose scared him more than it ensnared him. Maybe Joe has too much sense to follow Patrick deeper down this road. Maybe he hopes that by insisting on the plain and the ordinary, denying the siren call of any world flickering behind this one, he can keep them both firmly rooted in reality. He chomps on his bagel and looks satisfied with that, as if bagels are enough for anyone, as if when a world has eggs and lox in it there’s no need to search for anything more.

But the bite of the rose pulses in the palm of Patrick’s hand, and he can’t stop feeling the bite of the wolf leaving silvery ghost imprints all over his skin. The Beast has used up all his _nos_ , and he is saying _yes_ to this mystery. Over the river and through the woods, to Hurley’s house he’ll go. 


	2. baby, nobody will love you like i do, i guess that’s half true

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to part 2! I'm hoping to have this all finished up to post the final part for Halloween... fingers crossed. I never have any idea what I'm doing or if I'm going to pull it off. everyone: your comments have been giving me life and energy and spooky joy; thank you all so much. d: this chapter is entirely your fault.
> 
> [Wolf Songs](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0X5Nbz1xoG5soMVdBjrhDD)

Andy Hurley doesn’t live in the city anymore. Why would he? Nothing for him there. He lives in a mossy overgrown cottage in the wild part of the forest like a woodsman, and he keeps his knives sharp, so if he should ever meet a beast, he can cut its heart out.

He’s in his yard chopping firewood when the stranger comes. Can you blame him for gripping the haft of his axe more tightly as the figure approaches?

“Morning!” calls the stranger in a voice far too loud and cheery.

“Is it?” Andy grunts. He turns his back, stacking fresh cords of wood on the pile beside his cabin. Winter’s never far off, up here. Even summer mornings are filigreed in frost, and summer is long past. The days shorten, the shadows lengthen. The year stretches late.

“Uh—yes?”

Andy turns his back on the stranger because he has work to do, because he’s no conversationalist, and because it took only a glance to size this kid up and rule him out as a threat. He’s under five and a half feet tall, the kind of blond that gets duller and duller with age in an all-too-apt metaphor for life, and Andy could snap the soft, unmuscled length of him over his knee easier than he’ll split his next log. He’s got city all over him, flecks of silver glitter clinging to his soft inner elbows and the tender skin beneath his ears. His glasses aren’t fooling anymore, and he’s dressed like he got confused somewhere between ‘fuck me’ and ‘intellectual.’ Except—turning back with a new log to split—his too-tight t-shirt is for a band Andy kind of likes. And it’s been a long time since Andy had anyone but the trees to talk to.

He swings his axe over his head and brings it thunking down to rest, buried in his chopping block, severing nothing. Instead he wipes smarting hands on the rough fabric of his jeans and offers his right to the kid to shake. 

The kid takes it cautiously, like he’s never seen a blister before, and his grip is as soft as Andy expected. Except for—Andy grabs the hand harder, twists it palm up as the kid yelps—yep. Fingertips give him away.

“Musician,” Andy says, not warmly. He drops the kid’s hand and stalks away, round the back of the cottage to his woodshed. He slips into its dark opening and begins rifling around in the shadows for the tools he’ll need to deal with this. 

Slipping, sneakered footsteps follow him, sliding over mud and leaf-rot as the kid struggles to find Andy’s path through the undergrowth. Andy snorts to himself. Now there’s a metaphor.

“Okay this is—weird,” the kid calls at his back. “But I’m looking for someone, and I think it might be you.”

Andy’s hand closes around iron. He hefts its weight. “Was afraid you’d say that,” he says, and emerges from the gloomy shed brandishing—

A kettle. What, did you think he’d kill the kid on sight? Hermit and recluse he may be, but Andy takes very little more seriously than the sanctity of life.

Well. Most lives.

The kid has a look on his face like he’s not convinced Andy didn’t get that kettle just to brain him with it. “Come inside, then,” Andy says gruffly. That’s about as polite as he gets. “Figure we’ll need tea for this.”

Fifteen minutes later, the kid is perched on Andy’s mossy loveseat, trying to look polite about it and mostly failing. As if whatever hellhole he rents in the city he stinks of is any better! But seeing it through a visitor’s eyes for the first time in a long while, Andy has to admit he’s let the place go a little. Moss crept through the door first, and he found it an improvement over the packed dirt floor—springy, sweet smelling, colorful. Then it was the vines, pushing at the windowpanes and gaps in the brick til they found their way in, twining over the walls in more beautiful a pattern than any paste wallpaper. And once the vines were in, well. A bit like trying to hold back the tide, isn’t it? Holding back the forest? To green things Andy’s heart is wide open. He flung open the doors and welcomed it in.

The stranger hasn’t yet taken a sip of his tea, even though Andy helpfully reassured him it was not poisoned. Maybe this is related to the small tribe of spiders Andy displaced from the kettle prior to its use. “The spiders also were not poisonous,” he tells the kid, in case it helps.

Andy would offer him biscuits or tea sandwiches or something of the sort, but it’s been a long time since he went to town for groceries. He’s been experimenting with roots, the way the woods do it: sending tendrils of yourself down deep, into the darkest and most slithering wells of earth, and drinking clear minerals and cool green light for sustenance. He’s not too shabby at it, he thinks. Hasn’t needed nourishment any other way in—well, he forgets how long. Time runs different when you’re the only one around who insists on perceiving it. Absence of human company seems to make him a little less so. 

The kid picks up his tea cup, takes a deep breath, then sets it down again. Andy’s a little offended—he gets along well with the plant that gave its leaves for this tea—but he doesn’t press the issue, just savors his own a little extra.

“This isn’t what I expected,” the kid finally says. Andy hums in what he hopes is a friendly way. “Like—don’t take this the wrong way—but what _are_ you?”

Andy thinks back, trying to remember if he ever introduced himself. He may have forgotten. Social niceties are so much to keep track of. “Andy Hurley,” he says, better late than never. The knives on his belt clank together delicately as he sits down across from the stranger, a sound that always reminds him of wind chimes.

“Like—the same Andy Hurley who used to be in a band with Pete Wentz?”

Casually, calmly, like he’s merely scratching an itch, Andy moves a hand to his belt and eases his favorite knife free. “Now there’s a name I’ll thank you not to utter in my home.”

The kid’s eyes are locked onto the bare blade in Andy’s hand, even though he really is being _very_ casual. It’s one of his favorites, an oak-and-bone handle with six inches of Damascus steel pouring out from the haft like a river, like a whisper, like a ripple of silk. Andy cleans it every day, smoothes out imperfections with a whetstone, watches sunlight play over its colorful striations. It’s the ideal length for cleaning a fish or slitting a throat or plunging between the ribs of a wolf to spear its grimy black heart. Andy can’t imagine why it’s making the kid nervous. Then again, he also can’t imagine why someone would come into the very heart of his wood after all these years and drop the name of the Beast from a tongue they hoped to keep.

“You have a lot of scars,” says the kid, and this is true. Andy pushes up his sleeves so the kid can see them better: hard, shiny canyons of stiff pink collagen, wrapping around his forearms with the motion of great, savage jaws that snapped and tore and ripped his flesh clean to the bone. Looking at the ridged reminder of those wounds, you can’t help but imagine the terrible creature that left them. Andy runs his thumb over one of the places his skin twisted as it tore apart. No feeling left, not after the nerves snapped like wires, but still he shudders at the numb, dead absence that slicks smooth beneath his thumb.

“Grisly, aren’t they?”

“What—what happened to you?” You could knock the kid over with a feather, he’s so pale. City boy never should have come to these woods. City boy needs no part of Andy’s old problems. 

“Mauled,” he says truly. “By the Beast. But I expect you knew that already. It’s why you came here, isn’t it?” Andy leans in close, grips his knife tighter. “Don’t know how I didn’t smell it sooner,” he mutters. “Under all the pollution, iron, and terrible cologne. It’s the stink of him. It’s ALL OVER YOU!”

Andy launches out of his chair, spilling his tea and the stranger’s too as he sends his coffee table flying, and pins the kid to the mossy loveseat with steel at his soft, glitter-flecked throat.

“If he sent you, I will kill you. If you lie, I will kill you. If I do not like the truth you tell, I will kill you,” Andy tells him matter-of-factly. Now that the graveyard scent of deliquescing rose is in his nostrils, he can smell nothing else. “So _speak_.” He presses a bit harder on the knife, encouraging.

“My name is Patrick Stump,” the kid says all in a rush. “I stole a rose and Pete—the Beast gave me an internship. Sometimes I think there isn’t anything in the world I want more than to kiss him, and I want to know why I want that. A wolf in sheep’s clothing but he’s not pretending to be a sheep, and I want to know if the trick is that he’s beastly and saying so or that he’s kind inside and hiding it. I want to know who he was before he became a Beast. I want to know if there’s a way he can be that again.”

Andy feels a deep weariness, on the inside and outside of his bones. It’s the feeling that makes trees drop their leaves and draw the green back deep, deep inside their smallest self, within the tender walls of their first rings. He sighs, sheaths his knife, and sits back. Now he wishes he hadn’t spilled the damn tea.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says with feeling. “Don’t tell me you’ve come to break the curse.”

_Once upon a time, in a city of jagged-jaw skylines and a lake made of ice, five young princes sought their fortune. Some princes don’t become kings. Some princes become rock stars._

_The princes had great talent, so together they formed a band. People liked listening to them play, and over time, their performances grew; shows outgrew garages, gymnasiums, basements, bars, and then finally the city that crowned them. The princes began to travel, singing their songs on stages across all the great cities of all the great kingdoms. They were lauded with records of silver, platinum, and gold. Their faces smeared the covers of magazines. Their names were spoken all around the world._

_But one of the princes was different from the others. He had in his heart a darkness, one that grew like a cancer, like a week, such that the fuller he became, the emptier he was: a hole, amassing more and more nothing. This prince wielded a gift greater than that of music. This clever prince with the cavern inside him, this prince played a game of words._

_The emptier he got, the greedier he became. More, more, more: this prince tried to stuff the whole of the world into himself. And everything he took in only made him more hollow._

_After a time, when he had used up every other delight and found it wanting, when he had burned through the good in himself til all that remained was terrible, gnawing emptiness, the prince began to turn on those who had always been most loyal. He grew jealous of the other princes, paranoid. They were more loved than he, he howled; more talented, he raged; plotting to leave him, he accused. And as his greed and rage consumed more and more of the love around him, he made his own fears come true._

_The very last prince to stand beside him—the one who would not leave him, not when there was still some hope of restoring within him the good—him, the hollow prince repaid with the bitterest betrayal. They had been lovers once, you see, in their youth, back when they only dreamed of the glory and the stage and the kingdoms beyond their own. Sweaty from band practice and alone in one or the other’s garage, their bodies would find each other eager and wanting. Hard, unpracticed kisses, quick darting tongues, bodies as yet unmarked but for the inked art of vanity. They knew nothing of the path ahead, only that they were young and drunk on potential and a little in love with themselves and each other and all that they might become. When they stopped being lovers, they remained the closest of friends and confidants. The loyal prince was the only one who could calm the other’s panic, who could soothe his sorrow, who would clean his self-inflicted wounds with compassion and salt instead of judgment. And in return, the hollow prince was the only place I ever felt at home._

_Our band was breaking up around us. We had never been richer or more famous, but we were these days notorious more than beloved. Most of us were barely speaking. We would play shows together and then splinter apart. We had made our fortunes together out of love and ambition, and now we could not stand to be in the same room. Trashed hotel rooms, drunken fistfights, affairs and falling outs in all the papers, the tides of public favor had turned against us. Our old fans hated our new music, our old friends didn’t return our calls. They called us sell-outs. They called him worse. And one day when the wolves were at the door, when the hollow prince’s terrible moods and worse behavior had eaten up every last bit of good will across the kingdoms, he received a threat from a reporter to publish his sexual indiscretions—the sex he had with men—proof he was gay. And instead, to bury this truth, he traded them the story and the photo proof that I was._

_I cannot describe the level of harassment and invasion the press and the public visited upon me after that. We were so huge and behaved so badly, all of us, everyone wanted to take us down. I couldn’t leave my apartment for a year without cameras going off in my face, or something hissing slurs at me. My family told me I would never again be welcome in their kingdom, that if I returned it was on pain of death. Our label had a decency clause, and the leaked photos violated it. They dropped us, and offered the hollow prince a solo deal. My life was ruined, and he signed an advance for half a million dollars, which piled up meaningless beside all his other unsatisfying riches._

_I am not proud of what I did next. Broken and bleeding from his betrayal, the scars you see now sunken into my spirit instead of on the level of flesh, I swore to work his monstrousness into his skin, so everyone could see what he was as plainly as he’d shown them what I was. It was simple: for so long as you behave like a beast, you will be one. If you would destroy me, do it with claws and fangs. I had no more patience for subtlety or cowardice. I would show him what it was to be hollow, to be hated, to be alone._

_I worked the curse into the soil and from it coaxed roses to grow. I sent the roses to the studio where he worked without me, and when he accepted them as adulation he believed he deserved, he was transformed. The rose was a mercy, a way out—for so long as it bloomed, he had a chance to break the curse. If he could learn to truly love another, and earn their love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all of time._

_I have seen what he has done, this past decade. The harm he has wrought with a new name, in a new tower, and the bodies he has chewed up and spat out in exchange for their own tainted, hollow fame. For his is the gift that devours. He used his money and magic to bury his old identity and our old music and start again, but there is no clean slate for a beast. Every person whose career he touches, whose body he touches, the curse touches too. They become as hollow and unsatisfied as everything else he ever possessed. And so the poison spreads._

_Above all else what I regret is that I cursed him, as if the form of a beast and a poisoned Midas touch could ever hurt the husk he is within. He has never cared for anything but himself and his own success. In cursing him, I have only made him more powerful. I have freed him from the burden of disguising his true self. I no longer hopes he finds it within himself to chase redemption. I hope he never breaks the curse. I hope someone pulls his crown down around his neck and chokes him with it._

_Once upon a time, my courage failed before my shattered loyalty, and all I did was place a curse upon the Beast. Now I know I should have killed him._

Patrick drives down out of the mountains like coming out of a dream. In the closed circuit of air conditioning in his rental car, he doesn’t feel real. Los Angeles itself is all one massive dissociation, but this is different. This is fucking _crazy_.

Did he just—have tea with a man who had leaves growing out of his beard? A man who claimed he was a prince who worked a curse on Pete? Did he just have a six inch fucking _knife_ pressed to his throat in the middle of the woods in Northern California, where the borders go hazy between waking-and-not, present-and-past, real-and-make-believe? Or is this merely the latest in a cascade of fucking _delusions_ he’s been experiencing ever since he pricked himself on that rose?

Used to be it was easy to tell, back in the suburbs of Chicago where he lived in a ranch house with his dad and knew who he was. Now he’s someone who puts on plastic clothes and dances on tables, who scrapes off his glitter to put on cowboy fringe and spurs and drawl _Howdy_ at tourists. Lots of surreal shit going down these days, is the point. Hard to draw clear-cut lines. Maybe it’s been a long time since he knew who he was. Maybe even longer than he’s been someone who goes to nightclubs with his boss and touches himself after, imagining the inhuman gleam of Pete’s gold eyes and sweet-rot charnel smell beneath Chanel.

See, fuck. Just thinking of that smell, the way it gathers and clings in the angles of negative space between them when Pete is near and Patrick is frozen like lusting prey—just imagining it gets him all tangled-up and drunk. Knowing what the Beast is, does he want him? Knowing the Beast can be saved, will he save him? Knowing what fame will cost, does he still want it? And does he want it more than he wants to save the Beast?

Patrick can’t take this shit. He wants something he knows for sure is real. He gets off the highway in Fresno, the grimmest dose of reality a city could be, and gets in the drive through lane of Inn-N-Out. He orders a cheeseburger and calls Joe.

By the time he’s back on the interstate, Joe’s asking for the third time, “And you’re _sure_ this forest hippie didn’t give you anything with mushrooms in it?” There’s a laugh in Joe’s voice, and concern too, and these piss Patrick off pretty equally. He doesn’t want to say _you aren’t supposed to eat or drink anything in Faeryland, so I didn’t_ , so he doesn’t say anything at all. “I just don’t know why you believed any of the shit he said, Rick. Like—he threatened you with a knife! This is an unhinged person! This is an alert-the-authorities type of situation, not a believe-the-crazy-dude-and-question-reality situation.”

“Why did I call you,” Patrick groans around a mouthful of burger. Even under the cheese, ketchup, mustard, and special sauce, the bright copper burst of blood hits his tongue. His stomach turns, but not in disgust—it’s arousal.

Patrick puts the hamburger down. When did meat start tasting so much like sex and death, fear and orgasm? But of course he knows the answer. When he made a deal with the Beast. 

“Because you knew I’d tell you it was bullshit,” says Joe. The phone line crackles like maybe the call is coming from another layer of real. “It’s okay, dude. All you need to be afraid of is self-styled green men with knives and your own suicidal desire to fuck your boss. Fairy tales aren’t real.”

Patrick bites his lip. That tastes like blood too, and by instinct, he bites down harder, breaking the skin. He drops his lip from between his teeth as soon as the pain hits, breathing harder. Fuck. He likes that too. Patrick crams the rest of the burger in his mouth at onces, jaws frantic to tear and grind and feed.

He thinks of the rose, wiltling slowly at home. He wonders how many petals it has left to lose, and what will happen after that.

Because Joe’s wrong about one thing. Fairy tales _are_ real. And Patrick is in one.

The voicemail must have popped up once he was far enough out of the mountains for cell service to return. Patrick doesn’t notice it til he stops for gas down in one of the Technicolor bright farm valleys. He puts it on speaker, hits play, and immediately drops the phone when Pete’s voice rises out of it like smoke.

“I listened to the hooks you wrote me. Not bad for a rose thief,” the voice of the Beast floats up from somewhere on the floor of the rental car. “So then I listened to your demo. That shitty tape you gave me? Your lyrics suck, Patrick. I wrote you new ones. I want to know how my words feel on your lips. Come home and sing them for me.”

Patrick drives like a man on fire after that. Every part of his body burns. He looks at the road and all he sees is Pete. Hands on the wheel, all he feels is Pete. Some dumb shit on the radio, all he hears is Pete.

He doesn’t make a decision. He just gets back to LA as fast as he possibly can.


	3. surrender, love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well cats and kittens, I intended to post the end of this fic today, in honor of HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE! As you're about to find out, that's not what happened. I set out to finish this tale and instead it picked up an extra chapter and a gore warning. So, um, enjoy? Thank you, as ever, for reading.
> 
> [songs to howl at the moon to](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0X5Nbz1xoG5soMVdBjrhDD)

Going into the woods is easier than coming back out of them again. Patrick’s phone is radioactive in his pocket beside his maxed out credit card, the voice of the Beast preserved within like a body in a bog.

He wants to call back. He wants to be famous. He wants Pete. He just doesn’t know in which order.

When he gets back to his apartment, the rose has molted its magnificence. It looks like any other flower now, cut to decorate the lobby of any other asshole. A corona of crisped brown petals lay without glitter or sheen on the windowsill. The four petals still clinging to the dry flower head don’t look magical at all.

“You are finally throwing that out, yes?” Anatoliy asks. “It stinks.” 

Privately Patrick thinks that if he can deal with the smell of boiled blood sausage, Anatoliy can cope with the rose, but all he says is “Give me a few more days. A week.” His time at Decaydance will be up by then, cursed or not. By then it won’t matter: no more Pete, no more opportunity.

_ Don’t make a deal with the Beast. _ Like  _ don’t go into the woods alone  _ and  _ don’t turn your back on a wild animal _ . Age-old laws of survival that Patrick disregards one by one by one.

He was so ready to believe everything Andy said, winding out of the mountains, through the crayon box of fertile farm valleys, a view of California with the magic built in, wild and beautiful with trees big enough to drive a car through. Hook, line, and sinker. But look at the rose now, so ordinary. In the cramp of this grubby apartment, the one he’ll be kicked out of at the end of the month when he can’t pay, as psychically far from Chicago as it is possible to be—this place isn’t magic. Magic is just another thing it consumes.

Patrick goes into the Coyote like it’s any other day. He smears glitter on himself, creating an illusion. In small, tight clothes, he performs to other people’s songs, pastes a smile on his face like it’s all he aspires to. It’s easy, appearing to be something you’re not. Why was he so astonished Pete Wentz could do it too?

He goes in back on his break, asks the DJ if she’s ever heard of a certain apocryphal band. Her face fogs over like sunrise on a smoggy day, then clears. “Wow, they used to be the hottest shit. I haven’t heard that name in what, 20 years? Haven’t even thought it. Yeah, let me see what I can find.”

Patrick picks up his tray from the bar and starts his delivery rounds. When the music starts, it’s pre-familiar, like how a bruise helps you imagine a break. He’s heard this song in his dreams, or from the next room, or he hasn’t heard it at all. He hums along, shaking his hips experimentally, willing the melody towards recognition. But as far as he can tell, it only feels like something he knows by heart. The notes themselves are brand new.

He’s not prepared for the way Pete’s voice sounds coming over the speaker, filling the club, so you can imagine how unprepared he is for the way Pete’s voice sounds coming from one of his tables. He half-drops the drinks he’s setting down, sloshing martini onto the table before he can right the glass.

“You didn’t call,” purrs the Beast, pouting his lips just so, showing a teasing flash of fang. Patrick proceeds to have a heart attack. 

“What are you doing here?” Patrick squeaks, sucking martini off the back of his hand. It’s not exactly debonair, but neither are his hot pants. He can’t reconcile the sight of his bigshot boss with this dark sticky club, and the shame he usually forgets to feel comes crashing like the tide.

“You think I don’t smell this place on you? Your dollar store shower gel doesn’t begin to cover up where you’ve been.” Pete sniffs, scowls. “Tell me, where is it I smell on you now?”

And Patrick—Patrick really just can’t cope with this shit right now, okay? He  _ just _ decided the Beast wasn’t real, didn’t he? That he didn’t believe in any of it? That it didn’t matter if he fucked Pete or not, got a record deal or not, because curses aren’t real and there’s nothing in Pete that can poison Patrick’s life other than the obvious. And now Pete drags light fingertips along his arm and the skin parts politely around them, opening to let his blood breathe. He doesn’t see claws, no, but it’s hard to say he doesn’t believe they are there when his blood blooms so red. Red as a rose.

“I didn’t know you sang,” Patrick says, changing the subject. He points to the ceiling, the music throbbing all around them. “You never told me.”

Pete takes a sip of his martini, his face revealing nothing. For once his sunglasses sit on the table, within reach but not actively obscuring his amber-or-is-it-yellow gaze. “I wasn’t ever much good. I’d rather talk about you. I wrote lyrics for you.” Pete laughs, in this moment decidedly human. “I’m worried what you’ll think. Another feeling I’m not used to.”

“Who else have you written lyrics for?” Patrick asks. Tonight he’s made of the wrong things. There’s something too big here to look at directly, so he focuses on sideways questions.

“No one,” says the Beast. Patrick opens his mouth to say it’s not true, because he’s memorized the discography of Pete’s label and he can prove this one thing false, and Pete raises his hand to interrupt. His claws clink together with the motion. “Well, technically I wrote with Spencer. But that was nothing like this. Like writing these for you.”

“I know there have been others,” Patrick says, the tone of his voice and the angle of his chin sketching a challenge.

Pete doesn’t deny it. “Of course. I have been alive for a long time. But you are the first like you.”

Patrick believes him. Patrick doesn’t. Magic is real. Magic is only a trick of the light. Patrick opens his mouth, then closes it. His arm is bleeding freely from where Pete touched him, except that’s not real, it can’t be. He should worry more about paying his rent and less about what’s real and what’s not. 

“I have to dance,” Patrick says, because that at least he knows is true, as Pete’s voice fades from the speakers and the rose dies a little more at home. He leaves the Beast and his spilled martini behind and hightails it to the bar. Even though no one’s asking him to, he hops up onto the counter and begins to shimmy. The DJ puts on another oldie, but this one Patrick knows. He sings along as he dances, and one of the other bartenders climbs up to join him. Patrick works with Michael a lot, and the regulars like to see them together. Michael dances towards him and they engage in a pantomime: Michael advances, Patrick drops to his knees. Customers are watching now, voices are rising in appreciation, money is leaving wallets in more of same. 

As Patrick grinds on his coworker, he could not believe in magic any less. As he notices a fury-faced Beast elbowing his way through the crowd, he has no doubt fairy tales are real. Pete’s face is remade, snarling like a wolf; no flicker of reality can conceal the fangs curling out of his cavernous black mouth. Someone screams, jostled by his suddenly burly form. That thick meat smell reaches Patrick’s nostrils when Pete’s still impossibly far away. More shouts erupt; someone behind the bar grabs the tap and starts spraying little bursts of water into the crowd, like that’s ever calmed anybody down.

The Beast gets closer, clawing through bodies with an inhuman face, and Patrick’s belly clamps with cold as he realizes the Beast isn’t headed for him. 

Patrick shoves Michael off the bar in the nick of time. Wooden splinters fly into the air as the Beast’s claws slam into it, gouging great rents into the wood where Michael was wriggling a second before. Patrick freezes like any prey animal would before the frothing jaws of a monster. He really is as bad as everyone says, Patrick thinks, or else he can’t think over the screams. Bouncers are on the Beast now, trapping his arms behind him, torn with wounds they could not have seen coming nor avoided; camera phones flash as the howling, slavering Beast is hauled bodily from the club. Patrick stands dripping wet and stricken on the bar, saying nothing, watching the Beast go. 

After he gets fired from the Coyote, Patrick intends to go straight home. Intends it all the way to Beverly Hills, to the address Pete texted him in the bomb-drop silence after his removal from the club. Intends it as he gets out of the Uber he can’t afford. Intends it as he walks up the twisting, hedge-obscured path towards the front door of the Eichler-style mansion he gaped at from the street.

At the point of knocking on the Beast’s front door, Patrick admits to himself that his intentions are no longer clear to him. He raises his fist and the door swings inward before he can strike it.

On the threshold is the Beast. His hair is damp, towel tousled, and he’s wearing nothing but silky athletic joggers and a sheepish look on his face.

“I’m so relieved you came,” says Pete, at the same time Patrick says, “You really fucked up. Like, every part of my life.”

Patirck doesn’t realize how angry he is until he starts shouting. “You complete fucking asshole! What were you gonna do? Kill him? Because we danced together and, what, you wanted me to dance with you instead? Literally who acts that way, Pete!” It’s not a question, none of them are really questions. Patrick will hurl accusations and blame until his twisted-up insides are empty and smooth again. He will empty himself of poison and let it all soak into Pete. One of them’s a monster anyways. The other of them doesn’t have to be.

“I am—sorry.” The words grate out like rust. Patrick doesn’t want to listen to a little soliloquy about how long it’s been since Pete gave someone an apology; he doesn’t want the apology at all. He wants his life to make sense again.

“You fucking will be! A hundred people took pictures of you tonight, looking like  _ that _ , and if Michael decides to sue you’ll be in jail!”

A dry little laugh. His eyes are so big, clear as polished amber, wide with some sorrow that doesn’t translate into the tongues of  _ human _ or  _ fury _ or  _ youth _ . “No, I won’t be. Consequences are not as sticky as you might think. Boys like Michael—this city is choked with them. Once the blood dries and the drama fades, people stop caring. It takes longer for a glass of champagne to go flat than it takes this town to cover up last night’s suffering with today’s glitter.”

“I  _ am _ a boy like Michael!” Patrick spits.

“And I want to make you more.” The Beast’s voice like silk, like a snake, like Satan. 

“I lost my goddamn job tonight because of you,” Patrick hisses. He feels dangerously like he’s running out of ammunition, doesn’t know what he’ll do with all this rage when he’s out of bullets. Maybe he’ll hurl his body at Pete instead of words, kiss or kill, and carve them both up. “I had to tell them you were my fucking boyfriend, which is against like, the only club rule, because how else could I explain away something like that? I couldn’t have them following you, trying to get your name or a good look—”

“Wait,” Pete interrupts. It is the wrong fucking moment to interrupt, but his voice is so soft, his body so human, his skin so unguarded and bare. Patrick tries not to look lower than Pete’s neck, purely out of self-preservation, but even at neck level Pete looks so vulnerable, like his heart beats on the outside. And the tattoos—they guide the eye lower.

Patrick’s yell has died in his throat.

“You lost your job to  _ protect _ me,” Pete’s saying. “Because you—care about me?”

“I think that’s pretty fucking obvious.” Patrick crosses his arms over his chest. “Why would I be so fucking mad at you if I didn’t?” 

“Because you’re wet, covered in glitter, and took a rideshare across Los Angeles—and I haven’t even invited you inside?” Pete tries, but Patrick is not receptive to levity. Patrick is so mad he wants to launch himself at Pete, cover his ridiculous amount of abs with his hands and lips and tongue, kiss his way from Pete’s winged hipbones up to his collar of thorns, wants to empty his fear and anger into Pete’s body until they both break—

“Please, come in. Do you want a shower or a change of clothes?”

Patrick makes his hands into fists, to remind himself he’s angry in the face of kindness, to keep from reaching out and touching Pete as he passes. He steps over the threshold and into a house he is determined not to appreciate. It’s all high ceilings, exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a lagoon pool, ringed in fir trees. Pete leads him into a sunken living room and stands stiffly beside one of three emerald velvet couches. Patrick stalks in and flops aggressively on the chaise lounge, hoping his glittery completely destroys the velvet upholstery.

“I’m not convinced I want anything from you,” Patrick mutters. His temper has always been corrosive, sprayed like venom across everything in range.

“I’d like to convince you.” Pete sits gracefully on the edge of the loveseat. Patrick’s eyes snag on every single one of those abs as he sits down. A Beast should have more body hair, but Pete has almost none. This is  _ not _ the time to desire Pete, but god knows that’s never stopped him before. “Patrick—you have no reason to care for me, yet even in anger you came here concerned for me. Striving to protect me. I must ask—how fares the rose?”

Ugliness roils inside Patrick, weeks of fear and lust spoiling at last, like milk sat out too long, like a body left in the sun busting with gas and flies and rot. This self-serving bastard, thinking only of his own curse. Or: this soft, messy bastard, who after so many mistakes still finds it in himself to feel love, to hope it may be felt in return—because isn’t that the first step of breaking the curse? Doesn’t Pete have to fall in love with someone before it even matters if they can love him in return?

But that’s ridiculous. Pete doesn’t  _ love _ him, any more than Patrick could fall for a Beast. Patrick just wants to fuck him, very badly. Those aren’t the same at all.

“We both have bigger problems than the rose,” says Patrick, because at the last moment he does not want to hurt Pete after all, does not want to say  _ you’re a dick, so of course the rose is dying _ . “What are you going to do about the pictures? How am I going to pay my rent?”

“Those photos—they won’t show what you fear. I’ll buy them if they do. Magic decides when it wants to be discovered, and by whom. I am quite safe, as is the nature of anyone in a self-made prison. And as for your rent—I will pay it, or you’ll accept a job at Decaydance, or you’ll sing the words I wrote you and it will make you a fucking star. The things you are worried about are details, not problems. But the rose—there are things I haven’t told you—”

Patrick decides he cannot bear to hear them. Whether Pete says  _ I love you _ or  _ I don’t _ , Patrick simply can’t. Panicking, he does the only thing he can think of, the only thing he’s been able to think of since they met. He springs up from the chaise, kneels before the Beast, commands, “Shut  _ up _ ,” and kisses him hard enough to feel fangs.

✨

_ How big your eyes are, my dear. How firm your grip on my jaw. How deep your kiss. All the better to consume me with. _

You step into my bloody chamber not like the ingenue but like a man making a decision. When last have I been the result of anyone’s reasoned choosing? It makes me tremble, the promise of you knowingly stepping into my terrible embrace. You kiss me like my spit will clear enchantments from your eyes, like you can taste the root of all sorcery if you can lick all the way down into my belly. Your tongue laps at the heat of me and you reach for the blue flame of my heart. You kneel between my legs and my thighs press against your shoulders and sometimes, when I’m around you, I feel like pure evil. One hand on my face and the other stroking up my inner thigh, and I am all quiver and bones, the keening thing you’ll meet in the middle. I hope neither of us is counting on  _ me _ being the one to stop  _ you _ , because that’s just not how this story goes, Little Red Riding Hood. Your tongue is tracing a narrative that only goes in one direction. I am hunger incarnate, you are innocence consumed. But then, innocence has never slipped their hand so high up my thigh before. 

I know you feel my fangs stiffening because you yelp into my mouth and then kiss me harder, slicking both our tongues in blood. Your hand is high enough now you can feel more than just the beast within me stiffen and stir. One inch higher, and now you can feel everything I’ll ever do to you. Fuck, but nothing could have prepared me for how my cock feels in your hand. This wasn’t in the storybook. Stroke, pull, swallow it whole: do whatever you please with this last human part of me. It’s yours, I’m yours. To this carnal need I at last surrender.

You are moaning, dear, as my teeth find your neck, but this is the gentlest I can be with your hand doing that. I beg you not to say  _ stop _ for I won’t know how to, not to say  _ no _ for it will only excite me more. It is wrong to need this way, darling, but here you are on top of me, and I never thought I’d show my belly to anyone again. I don’t lay on my back unless it is to deceive, but here I am, tame as a kitten on a rug, as you stretch me out over the couch and climb on top of me.

Patrick, you look so  _ surprised _ . I can’t look away from the wonder on your face. What did you think I was? What did either of us think. Because I find, the way you move on top of me and the ragged breath it tears from my ribcage—this is not a game for me. It usually is, if only because everyone I touch is too empty to hold meaning.

“I never do this,” I exhale, the fine gold hairs on your cheek moved by my breath.

You grind your hips down into mine, pressing us together without gentleness, and snort. “Yes you do,” you laugh, your impossibly red mouth kissing down my throat, collarbone, chest. “The thing everyone says about you is be careful, because you  _ do this  _ all the time.”

Reality is so fucking irritating. Of course I lie with strangers. My stretched, frozen in amber life has been so long, so filled with beds and bodies. Time doesn’t pass for me, really, but lovers do. Notches in bedposts, clawmarks in hipbones, scratches in cell walls. A way to scar time as it flees past you. But  _ this _ : my bare shoulders kissing velvet, your tongue mapping my chest, the weight of tiny, defenseless, human you bearing down on me: this is the new. The angrier, hungrier, wilder you feel, the further back in repose I lie. I  _ let _ you do things to me. I let  _ you _ be the one to leave the marks.

I think maybe I like the feeling of letting.

You might ask—isn’t it boring, playing out the same half of a fairy tale for all of your days? Dreadfully, darling. That’s the point of a curse. Somehow, with you, I feel like a prince again, one never swallowed by a monster. You roll your hips, straddling me, so I can feel your need pressing against mine, and I wish I knew  _ why _ you were doing this. I wish you’d tell me about the rose.

Because I feel—more than your dick. Romance is clumsy when you have known only hunger for time immemorial. What is it, that I feel like syrup and suffocation in my chest when I look at you? When you arch into my touch like a cat? I find your name in my mouth, don’t know how long I’ve been saying it. I know you will be ruined if I have you, that’s how this works, but god, thorn, and sundown, I can’t bear it any longer. You belong to me, you just don’t know it yet. I’ll show you. I’ll let you show us both. 

Hard, now, to think. Your  _ body _ , the heat of it, the way you push your advantage and wait for me to push back. My hunger grows, darling. My muscles tense as if to spring. I press up against you, catch you off guard, roll you off the couch and onto the floor. You smack on hardwood, lips parted around breath stolen by impact, and I land on top of you with every claw tip quivering. Enough of this terrible longing. Time for the kill.

_ Oh darling, what big eyes you have; what big moans. What big stains you leave upon my bedsheets. The better to love you, to love you, to love you, my dear. _

✨

Patrick wakes up, and that’s the first surprise. Surprises two and three arrive promptly: silk sheets beneath him, a plush fur throw against his back. All his life he’s woken up resentfully, and the whole time it turns out all you need to feel really rested is a shit-ton of money and the type of bedding kings sleep on.

Fame is going to suit him.

Cringing from sunbeams and his own ambition, Patrick rolls over to nestle deeper into the bed, and discovers that the heavy pelt at his back is not a fur blanket, it’s a man. Pete is still asleep, and when Patrick shifts, he snuggles closer, tucking his chin onto Patrick’s chest. Patrick’s heart slams against his chest so hard he’s sure it will wake the Beast. Here, on stained silk in the Beast’s carnal den, Patrick wakes to tenderness, and this is the first time he has truly comprehended terror. 

With terror comes deer-in-the-headlights clarity. Patrick doesn’t want to save the Beast. He doesn’t know how to fall in love with a storybook monster. He’s just a kid from the suburbs of Chicago, with a dumb, self-centered dream. He can’t save anyone. He can’t even pay his rent without selling his body to coyotes; now he’s traded it for a record deal to a wolf.

But even scared, he can’t forget how last night felt. When they got in the shower and Pete knelt, hollowed his cheeks around Patrick’s aching cock. The way it felt when Pete let Patrick inside him, facedown on silk, so hot and tight and human. The way Patrick wanted and needed and  _ burned _ , and Pete was cool water, Pete slaked and soothed every raw nerve of him; the way they buried themselves in each other, fucking every way Patrick had imagined and a few he hadn’t dreamed of yet; and all of it somehow  _ gentle _ , even when it bled, even when it bruised.

He’s never felt pleasure like that. That scares him too.

He peels himself out from under the Beast, careful not to wake him. With sunlight striping his face, Pete snores gently, his hair sticking every which way, his morning breath rank. He is beautiful as he is ordinary. Patrick’s skin is scored red and throbbing, but there are no claws at the end of Pete’s long fingers. He can’t imagine the state of his gnawed collarbone, yet the incisors in the shadows of Pete’s parted lips are no sharper than Patrick’s. He’s never known where he stood in relation to reality, to Pete, and sex… sex did not simplify the matter.

He pads on bare feet towards Pete’s enormous bathroom, which he did not fully appreciate while being blown in the shower or bent over the counter and fucked slow. It’s got high, paneled ceilings, drapey gold light fixtures, pearl inlay tracing patterns in the white marble shower. There are more showerheads than Patrick can imagine the purpose of, and an enormous tub with clawed feet as big as Pete’s. The heated towel rack is laden with the fluffiest, purest white towels Patrick has ever seen, like some kind of metaphor he’s not willing to comprehend. He runs himself a scalding hot shower, the kind of heat his old apartment building can never quite muster, and discovers that Pete’s luxury shower gel stings just as much in fresh wounds as the shitty dollar store stuff he has at home.

His eyes are closed, face under the spray, expensive lather running down his sore body, when the knock comes. Patrick shrieks like he’s naked and defenseless in the home of the Big Bad Wolf. It’s Pete, equally naked, rapping on the glass shower door. He’s smirking, waggling Patrick’s glowing phone. “Three calls in the last three minutes,” Pete says. Maybe it’s the distortion of the water, of the glass, but Pete’s voice sounds entirely human. 

He’s beautiful. Of course he is. Patrick wants him, just as desperately as before. But he searches for fangs just the same. It’s not the man he came here for. It’s the Beast.

The phone starts ringing again, there in Pete’s hand. Patrick opens the shower door and Pete slips in, kissing his neck and pressing the phone into his wet hand. Patrick gets out, wraps himself in one of those towels of excess, and against his better judgment, answers the phone.

“Hey, Dad,” he says. He aims for a tone that says  _ bright, upbeat, definitely not working at a sexy dance club _ . Maybe that’s a big ask for two words, because his dad doesn’t go for it.

“Patrick.” His father’s voice is stuffed with unease, a cloud about to rip apart in thunder. “You need to explain yourself, son.”

His dad is way too terrifying to get loud when he’s mad, but Pete’s head jerks up anyway, even through the rush of the shower orienting to the sound. Patrick’s blood thrums in his veins, an animal response to an animal movement.

Patrick’s done a lot of things, lately, his overprotective dad would object to. Not the least of which is arching his back beautifully in the shower, stirring a response from parts of Patrick’s body that don’t care  _ who _ he’s on the phone with. “Gonna need to narrow that down, Dad,” he says, his eyes not leaving Pete.

He can hear how red with Midwestern rage his dad’s face is, by the taut tremble of overcontrol in his voice. “The  _ pictures _ . My buddy Stan sent them to me. Rick, what have you gotten yourself into? I never should have let you move to LA.”

Patrick should be worrying about this situation, probably, except his eyes keep getting stuck on Pete, dragged up and down his honey-gold form, lathered with soap and twined by uncurling billows of steam. Patrick is way too sore from what they spent all night doing to take anymore, but it takes all he has not to drop the phone on the tile and float back into the shower, pulled by enchantment, the Pied Piper’s song. The bathroom smells like tea tree and lavender, the wrong botanicals entirely; he wants to get close up, breathe in the sweet-rot rose of Pete.

He stumbles before he realizes his feet are carrying him back towards the shower, compelled by a siren song. He clears his throat, can’t clear his head. ”What pictures?” he asks, only speaking it is the spell for remembering. Pete naked and glorious and wet, only glass and steam between them. Human, except out of the corner of your eye. And last night there were flashes going off at all angles.

Patrick takes the phone away from his ear, heedless of his father’s answer, and opens a browser tab. He searches Pete’s name, the club’s name, doesn’t think to type his own. And oh. Yes. There they are.

Pete was right. The pictures don’t show what Patrick worried they would. Patrick worried about the wrong thing entirely.

Pete looks human enough, a blur of a man blacked out by rage as he muscles through a crowd of glazed eyes and exposed skin. Michael is just a pair of thighs and high boots intersected by the frame. It’s Patrick who’s clear, focal, unobscured. In shot after shot being shared on Twitter and then repackaged as legitimate news by clickbait journalists, it’s Patrick. Patrick on the bar in leather and lace, skimpy black fabric that makes him look delicate and X-rated at the same time. His hips are cocked not like a coquette, but like someone accustomed to commanding the room; his lips are redder than rouge and parted to reveal a glistening tongue. In one of the shots, he appears to lean into the spray of water, glittering with droplets and showing his teeth in a grin. His shorts are cut so high you can see a shocking amount of his ass, cut so tight you can see a shocking amount of everything else. Like, the next three generations of the Stump family are showing. He looks for sale, for cheap. He looks  _ powerful _ . He looks totally delighted by the violent desire unfolding at his feet, like there’s no finer tribute than inspiring a bar fight. His eyes gleam manic, his body confident and over-the-top, his red turned-up lips parted like ecstasy. He looks look someone he doesn’t know. He looks gloriously and powerfully like himself.

One of the articles reads,  _ Is getting photographed with Pete Wentz of Decaydance Records enough to make you famous? Bad boy exotic dancer Patrick Stump seems to think so. _

Patrick closes the browser and steps closer to the shower. Pete rubs his own body, gold eyes locked on Patrick’s. “Like what you see?” he purrs, all suggestive eyebrows, and Patrick doesn’t know if he means Pete’s half-hard sudsy dick, the pictures and the accompanying press, or both.

“No,” he says, but they both hear  _ yes _ .

The tinny, distant voice of his dad is rising. He hears snatches of “Are you with him now?” and “need to come home immediately.” Patrick’s dad never quite recovered from learning his son was gay. It’s part of why he tried to keep Patrick at home for so long, like preventing him from  _ acting _ homosexual could prevent him from  _ being _ it. This is either the best or worst thing that’s ever happened to Patrick, and he could not care less what his father thinks about it. He lets his phone fall from his hand like it’s every tether to his old life, like it’s the path back to reality, like it’s the trail of breadcrumbs he thought he’d need to find his way home from the lair of the Beast. He either hangs it up first or not. Neither matters. Finally he yields to the pull of the Beast. Like a compass dragged to magnetic north, he lets lust and sorcery tug him back into the shower. The outside world and all its ramifications can burn, for all he cares. 

This is worth it.

If he had the body of a mythical beast, perhaps they’d keep fucking for days. Instead Patrick is only human, and eventually, he needs a break.

“Let me make you something to eat,” Pete murmurs. The bedroom is bled through with the murky gold of sundown. His fingers trip lightly over the aching, torn expanse of Patrick’s skin. He feels excoriated by desire, flayed by the thoroughness with which Pete fucks. Or maybe it’s all the scrapes, grazes, and puncture wounds that come with bedding a beast. Either way, he is entirely sated, every nerve stimulated until it’s given up, collapsed, burned out like a star, left him novocaine numb and sunk to the depths of his satisfaction. His bones are the only part of him Pete hasn’t touched.

“This isn’t one of those riddles, is it? Where if I say yes, you’ll make me  _ into _ food?” he asks lazily. He’ll say yes either way. He’s stone sober, entirely intoxicated, here at the mercy of the Beast.

Pete kisses under his jaw, smiling soft as butter. “Not tonight, Hansel. Need to fatten you up first.” Patrick shivers with the pleasure of being teased. Pete slips into a silk robe and leads him to the kitchen. Patrick no longer possesses the mechanism with which to protest, so along with Pete he goes.

Patrick sits at the thick-veined marble counter while Pete drops something fatty and raw into a skillet. He feels grease on his skin as the pan begins to smoke. Pete hums to himself as he cooks, an almost-familiar little tune, and Patrick aches with the complicated desire to see him both as only and more than human. 

After, he won’t know why he said it. Insecurity, maybe; regret. Eager ambition. Thoughtlessness. Maybe he meant nothing by it, or maybe he meant every word. 

There in the Beast’s kitchen, a frying pan sizzles and Patrick ruins it all.

“So now we’ve done that—should we talk about my record deal?”

If it’s a joke, it falls flat. If it’s a request, it lands like a hand grenade. They freeze in the suspended silence before it all blows up around them.

“Oh,” says the Beast, and there is the impression of a blinding light. Black as ash against the light, Patrick sees the silhouette of a terrible form: hackles and ragged mane, long ridged spine, knobby muscles and four-inch claws, gaping fangs overflowing tremendous jaws. It is so much more horrible seen straight-on than stolen in sideways glances. Patrick’s scream cracks on his lips, ripping the silence. Then the light fades, his vision clears, and instead of a hulking monster there is only the slight, human shape of Pete.

Patrick is frozen as he turns. He is so terrified as seeing Pete’s face, whatever is or isn’t upon it, he shuts his eyes.

“We’ll sign the papers tomorrow,” says the Beast. His voice is toneless. Patrick feels wrung with ice water. Still he dares not open his eyes. “Forgive me that I don’t have any contracts laying around the bedroom.”

I didn’t mean it, Patrick would say, but he doesn’t know if he did. I don’t want that, he’d say, but he desperately does. I want to break your curse, he’d say, but you can’t love someone just by wanting to. The truth is, the only part of Pete that draws Patrick like a flame is the Beast.

When Patrick finally opens his eyes, Pete’s back is to him, deftly transferring meat to a plate. “Please, eat before you go,” says Pete, says the Beast. Then he leaves the kitchen without turning, without looking back.

When Patrick gets home, the rose is dead.


	4. i don't feel a thing for you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last--the end. Thank you, everyone <3

Patrick puts on his nicest outfit for work the next morning, like this matters somehow after Pete’s seen him naked and inside out. Overdressed in the ill-fitted suit he wore to his dad’s wedding, brow garnished with the usual sweat, he actually isn’t all that nervous as he walks into the Decaydance building. 

He figures the suit, the embarrassing effort of it, will help him seem sincere. Sincere people probably don’t worry about how best to _seem_ sincere, they just—are, but Patrick’s working with what he’s got. He wants Pete to believe him when he apologizes, admits he’s an asshole, asks what it means that he’s killed the rose, and then proves his contrition by screwing the Beast on that big boardroom table like he’s wanted to since the first time he saw it. Pete will understand. Patrick will make him. 

But Pete doesn’t meet him at the elevator, doesn’t text him a badly timed coffee demand, doesn’t ambush him on the way to his desk. Odd, but it’s happened before; and with the bad blood and murky sex between them, he doesn’t blame Pete for punishing him. The Beast will sulk, maybe, make Patrick pull out all the stops to convince him his feelings are true. It might even be sexy, Pete holding a new type of power over him, bruises from Patrick’s mouth hidden under his clothes, making Patrick grovel. Patrick imagines kneeling in front of those big board room windows, sucking Pete’s dick deep into his throat while Pete uses his head as a surface to sign the contract. He shivers with thrill, dick stirring just from the thought of it. This is a misunderstanding; they’ll work it out. For the first time in a long time, things are looking up for Patrick Stump.

“Saw you in the paper,” Ms. Cogs greets him scathingly as he walks past her desk, hoping she can’t see his excitement through his shapeless suit pants. She gives no indication she can perceive him at all, actually, just shoves a file folder bristling with signature flags into his path with such dispassion he may as well be a filing cabinet.

Patrick settles in at his sleek, gold-accented desk, enjoying the high ceiling, aurora of natural light, and extremely well-appointed surroundings. He feels a bit like this is his castle, now. Maybe he should feel like just another pretty item for Pete’s use, but he knows it was different than that between them, knows he’s the first person in a long time who has known Pete for what he really is and wanted him anyway, wanted him because of. Maybe, his lips brushing Pete’s ear, he can make some suggestions about how the office is run. Maybe they can get some fresh roses up here, not just in the lobby. Maybe his desk can be moved onto Pete’s floor, the easier to meet illicitly throughout the day.

Lifted by daydreams, his body curling in craving for Pete and more than a little impatient for him to arrive, he opens the folder. And his guts run to ice. It’s a contract, the one he asked for, only it doesn’t feel like getting what he wanted. He’s not a lawyer, but he’s not seeing the exploitative clauses Pete’s contracts are notorious for containing. It’s a two record commitment with a modest advance, a very fair royalties agreement, and a renewal option based on sales and “artist discretion.”

The last page in the folder isn’t part of the contract. In the Beast’s spiky block handwriting, it’s a poem. No—lyrics, Patrick realizes, fitting it instinctually to the rhythms of one of his songs.

_I got a feeling inside that I can’t domesticate_   
_It doesn’t wanna live in a cage_   
_A feeling that I can’t housebreak_   
_And I’m yours_   
_Til the earth starts to crumble and the heavens roll away_   
_I’m struggling to exist with you, and without you_   
_But I’m just a full tank away from freedom_

The words go on, but Patrick has to stop reading. Patrick is overwhelmed or flattered or, or something. Oh—nauseated. That’s the word. Patrick is nauseated.

If he’s not very much mistaken, the Big Bad Wolf is in love with him.

Patrick’s desk phone rings and he jumps out of his human skin, leaving it behind. “Pete?” he answers, hopeful, panicked.

“Guess again,” Cogs says dryly, implying the word _idiot_ rather than stooping to say it. “You need to sign and initial at the flags, then send it down to Legal. Mr. Wentz has already signed.”

“I need to talk to him,” Patrick interrupts, not caring if Cogs can tell he’s desperate. (Which is good. She can definitely tell he’s desperate.)

“He’s not in today,” Ms. Cogs pronounces with no small pleasure. “Congratulations, Patrick. It seems you’ve made all your dreams come true.”

Patrick hangs up the phone. He turns back a page, hiding the lyrics. There on the dotted line at the bottom of the contract is that starburst squiggle, the mark of the Beast.

Patrick closes the folder and tries to feel anything at all.

Naturally, he calls Joe.

“It’s possible I’ve committed murder please come over right away,” he says when Joe answers. He’s pricking himself on dead dried thorns, trying to stick limp, no longer shining petals back onto a dead stem. Even his wounds don’t feel the same.

“You can’t just say you’ve committed murder over the phone,” Joe says, exasperated. “Homeland Security is gonna be all over your ass.”

“Always the critic. Get over here, please?”

Naturally, Joe comes over. Patrick undoes the series of locks fortifying his flimsy front door, and Joe thrusts a box of donuts in his face.

“I tell you I’m responsible for someone’s death and you bring donuts?”

“Always the critic,” Joe shoots back. “Every time I speak to my mother, she asks me if you’re eating enough. So yes. I bring donuts to your first murder.”

“She’s never even met me!” Patrick protests.

“And you’ve clearly never met a Jewish mom.” Patrick opens his mouth to protest again, and Joe puts a donut inside it. “See? I didn’t want to do that.”

While Patrick splutters donut crumbs, Joe pushes past him into the apartment. “So where’s the body we’re disposing of today?”

Okay, the donut _is_ delicious. Joe always brings the best food. Patrick follows him into the tiny apartment, grateful Anatoliy is out at one of his innumerable jobs, and leads him to the kitchen counter where he’s laid out the corpse of the rose.

Joe gives him as withering a look as a person can with chocolate icing stuck in the corner of their mouth. “Tell me you’re joking. I need to hear those words out of your lips, or I’m going to be so pissed at you. Tell me I’m not missing work because you murdered a _flower_.”

Patrick is grateful for the donut now, uses it to buy time. He crunches sprinkles between his teeth and tries to figure out what order this story makes sense in. The truth is, he wanted his night with the Beast to change him. He wanted the culmination of all that reckless, dreadful longing to remake him into something terrible and sure. He wanted to fall in love.

Last night he lay with the Beast. Today he feels nothing at all.

“I was supposed to fall in love with him before the rose died,” Patrick tries to explain. “It was the only way to save him. But I didn’t. I slept with him and asked for a record deal instead. Don’t get me wrong, the sex was—unreal. God, I hope I get to do it again. But I didn’t feel anything _magic_. No true love’s flame setting a wildfire in my skin or anything poetic like that. And now the rose is like this and I’m out of chances. I killed him, Joe. Now all that’s left is the Beast.”

Joe twirls the dead stem in his fingers, considering. “Well, how could you have broken the curse?” he asks at last. It is not what Patrick expected his skeptic to say. “It’s designed to be unbreakable.”

“No, it’s not. If he fell in love with me, and I fell in love back, he’d be free. He’d be human again.”

Joe shakes his head. “Isn’t the whole point that he sucked as a human, too? You told me everything he touches gets warped by the curse, just like he did. So no one can save him. To try to love him is to be ruined. Now you’re trapped by it too, aren’t you? You reach for what’s gold and discover it’s hollow.”

Patrick is a little stunned by the elegance of all that. “I thought you didn’t believe in the curse,” he mumbles, processing.

Joe shrugs, licks icing off his finger. Patrick’s brain is racing. He probes tender areas of himself, searching for feeling. Thrill or excitement about what happened with Pete? A dull flicker. Guilt or embarrassment about those pictures, dread about dealing with his dad? Flatline. His ambition and what’s going to happen next with his music career? Nothing at all.

Joe’s right. The closer he gets to all the things he thought he wanted, the less he can feel want. The less he can feel anything at all.

“Well, shit,” says Patrick. “Who can break the curse, then?”

“Was there anyone who loved Pete before he became poison?” Joe asks.

“Shit for real!” Patrick squawks, realizing. “The loyal prince. The crazy tree man. He’s the only one. I’m entirely fucked, aren’t I?”

Joe nods sagely and reaches for a long john.

Of course Tom Bombadil doesn’t have a fucking cell phone.

Now that it’s too late, now that he’s caught the curse, Pete is either avoiding him or so horribly transfigured he can’t go out in public anymore or _dead_ —

Now, finally, Patrick knows what he wants.

Joe lends his credit card to rent another car. Patrick wants to go straight to Pete’s house, break down the door, ride to his rescue—but what will he say when he gets there? Whathelp can he possibly offer? Kisses save lives in fairy tales, but this is Los Angeles. All Patrick’s kiss did was damn both of them. 

Instead he drives north, violating all posted traffic laws, left at Pasadena and into the trees. Not going all the way to NorCal, no way, no time; the Angeles National Forest will have to do. Trees are all connected, aren’t they? Their long tangled roots, their longer tangled memories. He’s going to find Andy Hurley in the first copse of trees he pulls over next to, and that’s just the way it’s got to be. Today’s the day fairy tale logic does something _for_ him instead of just _to_ him.

He dials Pete’s number again and again as he drives. Voicemails Patrick leaves for the Beast, a curated selection:

“You’re alive, right? Alive and just sulking? I didn’t know this would happen if we—um. If we had sex. Did you know? Did you think it would be… worth it?”

“Fuck, sorry, I totally failed to express concern in that last message, didn’t I? Pete, I am very concerned. I want you to be okay, okay? I have an idea for how we can break the curse. I know I didn’t work out according to plan, but I—just pick up your phone and I’ll tell you all about it, okay?”

“Is this how you feel all the time? All this—absence? You should have warned me. I… I don’t know how you fucking stand it.”

“I don’t regret it. Can’t even feel that. Being with you—it _was_ worth it. I want to do it again, do it all the time, as often as you’ll let me. I shouldn’t have asked for a contract, I was just… Well. I haven’t signed it. I’m not going to. Not unless I know you’re okay. So seriously, call me back. If you aren’t dead right now, you’re being such a dick.”

“The rose died, if you haven’t guessed. I fucking killed it. I was too selfish to break your curse. I wanted the Beast more than I wanted to save you. I’d say you have no idea how irresistible you are, but you have _every_ idea, that’s the whole problem. Not saying it’s all your fault. But it’s not _not_ your fault. Pick up the phone, Pete. This is a mess we made together.”

“Pete. I’m here. I’m getting out of the car. I really need you to forgive me. Because you’re gonna be pissed about what I do next.”

All the way up into the mountains, Patrick’s phone fails to ring.

Andy did not expect he’d ever see Patrick Stump again, and he was pleased enough with that outcome. But the man come shouting up oaks in Ojai is hardly the same one he met before. He’s changed in character, appearance, and bearing, Andy can tell by the sound of his voice alone. But then, curses do that to a person.

“No need to bring the whole forest down,” Andy grumbles, stepping out his front door and melting through the dappled shadows between trees so the path betwixt he and Patrick contracts to only a few footsteps. “Takes a man a moment to move to action from rest, that’s all.” At least Andy thinks that’s part of being a man. Hard to say, these days.

“Don’t even start with the spooky tree bullshit,” the kid orders him, instead of so much as a good afternoon, instead of even a moment’s appreciation for Andy’s obliging him with showing up in a grove of trees 250 miles south of the place he calls home. “And I don’t want any horrible spider tea, nor anything to eat or drink that will bind me up with you, so don’t offer. I’m here because I fell down the gaping hole you left in your curse, and you’re going to answer for it.”

Well, can’t blame a man for laughing at that, can you? Kid’s the size of a terrier and just as mean. “Not my fault you fell for the flavor of forbidden fruit,” he says calmly, making his way to a mostly rotted stump that’s not near as comfortable as his armchair. “I told you everything I knew about the magic, and you made your own decision. Had plenty of things to do today that weren’t being dressed down by you, so maybe you can make this quick?”

If possible, the kid’s face gets even redder as he stomps up to Andy’s makeshift chair. His hands are crunched up into fists and he sends leaves flying up with his feet as he moves, making seven kinds of fuss. The family of chipmunks nesting in Andy’s stump are rather affronted.

“I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of him. I’m not afraid of anything anymore!” Patrick bellows. Quite the set of pipes on this kid.

“Aye, well, that’s being cursed for you,” Andy says easily, and he slips a knife free from his sheath and into his hand, like he hasn’t a care in the world. The fact of the matter is, this kid stinks of beast fur, beast sweat, beast spit, and fouler fluids still. He may not have much feeling left, but the rage is coming through plenty strong, and he smells enough like a beast Andy best be prepared for him to act like one.

Andy’s both more and less than human these days, but he is mortal still. His beard runs to grey, the leaves in it know a deep autumn, and everything dies in its time. He finds himself in no hurry to meet his final winter and go to seed, least of all for the sake of the Beast, so he is prepared to tread lightly.

“So what is it you reckon I can do?” he asks, polite as a naked blade.

“I solved your riddle. I know you’re the only one who can break the curse,” the kid says, chest puffed out like a bluejay. He’s quite proud of himself, Andy can see that. He leans back in his stump, keeps hold of his knife, waits to see where this goes.

The kid gushes misinformation like a firehose. “You’re the only one who loved him as he was, when he was human. You said so yourself. You’re the loyal prince, the only one unaffected by the curse. You loving him, him loving you in return—it’s the only solution. So you’ve got to come with me, you’ve got to help me save him. We don’t have much time!”

Andy blinks at that. Andy goes ahead and has a _good_ long blink at that.

He leaves his knife to rest on his knee, tucks his gnarled hands and filthy fingernails into his armpits. His long, mossy beard brushes his crossed, scarred arms, the leaves copper orange this time of year. Outside the walls of his cottage, a few steps and a few hundred miles away, the wind rustles treetops like ocean waves crashing on the beach. The rough hewn logs of his home groan like the sway of the trees that gave them. His roots twitch and yearn in the soil, uneasy being stretched so far.

Andy speaks slow, enunciates clearly, so that this time there can be no mistake. “Unaffected… by the curse,” he repeats. A nice pause, he hopes, will help the absurdity pop out. Instead, the impudent kid pounces, nodding so hard his brains rattle, all in a tangle to fill Andy’s nice pause with words. Andy holds up a hand, cutting him off. He can’t take much more. “Kid. Patrick. Are you under the impression that I ran away to the woods to lick my wounds because the man you call Pete Wentz ruined my life?”

“Uh… yes?” Like it’s obvious.

“ _I_ ruined my life. When I cursed someone I had only loved, I made binding magic out of pain. I wrapped up my life in it. Now I’m not any more human than he is. The curse ruins _all_ it touches, kid. The Beast ruins all it touches. There is no love between us, nor ever was, that can break these chains.”

The kid opens his mouth and then closes it again. _Finally_.

“Whatever you thought magic was, it’s not.” Really, he’s trying to be helpful.

“Then what the fuck did I _drive here for_!” Patrick growls out, but Andy can sense the danger has passed: he’s talking to himself more than anyone else.

He shrugs one shaggy shoulder, displacing curls of birch bark. “Love, I imagine.”

“If I could feel love, I wouldn’t _be_ here!”

Andy shows all his rather greenish teeth in his trademark slightly horrible smile. “Whoever told you love is a feeling?”

The kid’s face falls, his confidence crumbling with it, and Andy can’t resist. Just a little fun. It’s true, anyway, even if it’ll do no good to say it. “Between you and me? I can feel him. Can feel all the parts of my curse. And if I were you—I’d hurry.”

_If Pete dies, it’s my fault. If Pete dies, it’s my fault._ It plays over and over in Patrick’s head as the wasted miles tick by in slow-motion. Turns out he can feel something after all. 

What a fool he’s been. All this dithering, his hare-brained solution, listening to _Joe_ of all people. The last time he trusted his instincts, listened to his gut, was the moment he reached out and touched that damn rose. It’s all been a fever dream since then, torn up on magic he can’t decide whether to flow with or fight against for more than a minute at a time.

Feelings are fleeting. Even if he doesn’t have them anymore, or they’re a little emptier than they used to be, they’ve never been the whole picture on their own. Love is an action and an intention. Love is the yawning terror in his gut that he’s too late. Love is why he cared so much in the fucking first place.

Love is driving north and norther into the Angeles forest, seeking the first place the canopy is dense enough to blot out the sky, screaming the name of a madman and beating your fists bloody on bark on naught but the conviction this is the most efficient way to get someone’s attention. Love is doing whatever it takes to save someone when you aren’t sure they deserve it—love is not really caring when you’re pretty sure they don’t. Loving is careening through L.A. traffic, fingernails piercing the steering wheel, considering abandoning the car at every gridlocked intersection because it’s not _fast_ enough.

What a fool he’s been!

At first he can’t find Pete’s house, like it’s Pete’s will alone that attaches it to reality and those bonds have been cut free. He drives up and down the street he knows Pete’s house was on, his eyes sliding over front doors and house numbers, til he pulls out his phone and rereads the text from Pete, the night he didn’t say no to the Beast. With the invitation fresh in his mind, his gaze can adhere to houses again, and he pulls the rental car up to Pete’s curb at last.

He hasn’t had a thought, really, since Andy sent him fleeing from the forest. All the worrying and internal yelling he’d usually have filled that time with, it hits him all at once. If Pete’s dead or harmed or cursed forever, Patrick’s fury will bring the whole world to its knees. Hurley thought he had problems before? Patrick will cut the sap-sticky heart from his wooden chest and feed it to Pete while Andy watches, and then he’ll burn every tree Hurley’s sent roots into to ash, and—

Rage centers and calms him. He feels brave enough now to face what’s inside. He doesn’t knock, he just grabs the knob and tells it to turn for him, and it does.

No sign of Pete in the entryway. Patrick pads through the living room, hesitating over shredded upholstery, shattered glass, molasses-thick black blood. He follows the sludgy trail down the hall.

He smells Pete before he sees him. The bedroom is dark and thick with shadows, the air heavy as velvet and stinking of something worse than sex, worse than death, something of cancer and ooze and despair. Patrick knows instinctively this is the putrid organic stench of magic, of curses. On the bed, through the clotted gloom, he makes out a vast, heaving shape. So much bigger than a man. So warped and misshapen it is hard to interpret as a living thing and not the tattered remnant of a nightmare.

“Pete,” he whispers. “Beast. My love.”

He feels daring as any storybook hero, saying the words. He’s not expecting the ragged, choking growl that rises from the shape on the caved-in canopy bed. He jumps back before he can stop himself, before he registers that menacing, inhuman sound as laughter.

“Is that what you’ve decided, thief-Patrick? Now that you have everything you hoped to gain from me, do you find love comes easy?”

Even his voice is a ruin, wet as meat and grating as bone. 

Patrick’s temper flares before his sense. “Yes, _easy_ is how I’d describe you,” he snaps. “I can’t feel anything, really, thanks to you. So I could stand a little less attitude.”

From the inky shadows, gold eyes glint reflected light. Patrick can imagine how Pete would smile at him, razor-sharp, if he took that tone at the top of the highest tower of Pete’s castle. Doesn’t feel like a moment for smiling now, though. 

Instead he forces himself to take a step closer. He says, “I know who you are. I know what you’ve done. And I want you. Cruel and hollow-hearted or whole again, monster or man, it doesn’t matter to me. Come out, Pete. Let me see you in the light. Let me see…”

_How bad it is_. He doesn’t say the words but they hang between them anyway.

The sagging bed groans as the massive shape upon it begins to shift. It’s so unnaturally dark in here, Patrick can’t make out what he’s seeing as the Beast begins to rise. The shadowed silhouette he glimpses is hideous, disfigured: a jagged tusk there, a gnarled knob of flesh there, an unholy angle of bone—til Pete has at last dragged himself into what passes for light. Dimly, Patrick can see all of him.

He looks like he’s been ripped apart.

Human fingers, split and bleeding from ragged slits where massive claws retracted. A dislocated jaw, mottled with bruising, great fangs smashed up beside human molars and streaked pink with pulped gums. Bone gleams marrow-gold where great spurs of it have risen from his spine and punched through his skin. His legs flop at angles that suggest his knees disagreed somewhere between reversed animal and forward-facing human. His body is a battleground, what remains after man and beast waged war for dominance. You can’t tell which won, only that Pete lost. Patrick tastes bile on his tongue and forces himself not to flinch, not again, as Pete labors to lift his head and meet his eyes.

Oh, and the eyes—fully human, oval with just one set of lids, red with burst blood vessels and clear brown at the iris, save for the contracted slit pupil of a cat. Patrick shivers under that strange, inhuman gaze.

_What happened to you_ , Patrick wants to ask. But he’s afraid the answer is _You_.

Blood is everywhere. Soaked through the shredded bedding, matted in Pete’s hair, caked thick in crevices of his body and weeping from his pores in tiny pinpricks, a sky shot through with horrifying stars. Patrick’s slow to realize it, reaching to clasp Pete’s torn hands in his own and finding them cold, but it’s harder and harder to deny. Pete’s life leaks out of him with every labored breath, the air too thick with offal and iron to really breathe.

The Beast is dying, and taking Pete with him. Soon Patrick will not have to decide which he loves best, for neither will be left.

“Do you have—a first aid kit?” Patrick asks, hearing how futile the question is even as he asks it. What good would band-aids and bacitracin be on this mangled husk of enchantment and flesh?

Blood bubbles at the corners of Pete’s mouth as he laughs. “Do not say that you love me, rose thief. I have felt the truth of it, laying here and waiting to die. You are too little and too late. Naught can save me now.” 

“ _Dramatic_ ,” Patrick growls, and he takes Pete’s rough bruised jaw gently in his hands and kisses him on the bloody lips. “Might be a better strategy to be _nice_ to the person you want to fall in love with you.”

Pete laughs, wincing as his jaw and ribs and torn-up everything moves, and Patrick sees clean, crystal tears course down his cheeks, leaving the skin clear of blood. “First I’ve heard _you_ complain about it,” he croaks. “Make them honor your contract when I’m gone, Patrick. Your songs are fine, for a debut album—”

“ _Hey_ —” 

“But your voice, my love. Your voice is so beautiful.”

Patrick kisses him again, forgetting to be gentle this time. There’s a tight throb in his chest and he can certainly feel _that_. “This isn’t goodbye,” he tells Pete, tears on his face that could be either of theirs and with no way of making his words true. “You’re being a baby about some minor wounds, that’s all. Some Tylenol and some rest and you’ll be good as new.”

Some Tylenol and a blood transfusion, maybe. There are more wounds than Patrick can hold shut with his hands. Pete is a dam bursting, and Patrick doesn’t have enough fingers to stop up all the leaks. 

“Will you sing to me, just this once? The words I wrote?” asks Pete, and Patrick can’t remember why he ever thought he didn’t love this man, why he ever worried the sexual dread of the monster was all that drew him in.

“No,” he says, and there’s no denying the tears are his now. “I’ll sing to you every day.”

Cradling Pete’s broken face, kissing his forehead, his brow, his cheeks, his lips, Patrick begins to sing, Pete’s words with his music. The song takes on a life of its own, different than Patrick’s ever heard it. The melody twines around them, drifting, lifting up, pulling them heavenward. Patrick closes his eyes as the song builds, too self-conscious of his singing to really let go while he watches Pete watch him. His voice catches on his tears at first, but the song is bigger than grief or sorrow. What they have made together is bigger than either of them, and as Patrick sings _these are the last blues we’re ever gonna have_ , something breaks open in his chest, and he’s weeping as he sings because he loathes that it should be true, that they should lose each other and this beautiful thing they can create together, when they’ve hardly begun.

When he reaches the end of the song, he leaves his eyes closed a moment longer, because in his arms Pete has gone terribly still, and if his eyes remain closed Pete will still be with him. Maybe he’ll go through the rest of his life this way, the taste of Pete’s curse on his lips and his eyes squeezed shut—

He opens his eyes. He eases Pete’s limp body back down onto the broken bed. He strokes his hands over Pete’s ruined skin and doesn’t know what to do. “I love you, I love you, forgive me,” he says, an incantation like a glass coffin to freeze them in this moment of dying forever, so the loss of Pete can never become past tense, so they will never really be parted—

Then there is a blinding light, the same supernova that near blinded him in Pete’s kitchen. The wave of gold knocks him back, and he goes blind for just one moment as he strikes his head on the floor.

When his vision returns, Pete is floating, lifted by the light. His limbs spread, cracking and unknotting, his joints popping wetly. The outline of his spine smooths, hooked bone protrusions sluicing away like water. The shape of his mangled hands spasms and begins to knit, shredded flesh sewn whole again in gold. The light caresses him, burning from head to toe, and in the golden outline there is no longer any sign of a beast—only a man.

The light goes out all at once and Pete’s body falls to the deeply scarred floor. Patrick is at his side before he’s finished falling.

The heat in Patrick’s chest flares so bright, it burns him from the inside out. His hands are on Pete, human and whole, and his touch is a prayer and a plea. He whispers-sings Pete’s lyrics to him, _I know I should walk away, but I just want to let you break my brain_ , because if he says anything else it’ll just be crying. Patrick keeps singing, _the glow of the cities below lead us back to the places that we never should have left_ , and it’s impossible as any of the rest of this when Pete’s eyes flicker open.

“Back to the places that we never should have left,” Pete murmurs in echo. “Let’s see how deep we get?”

Patrick laughs, or cries, or throws his arms around Pete so tightly he cries out, or all three at once. “Let’s see how deep we get,” he kisses into Pete’s clammy forehead. He can’t stop stroking the whole, put-together-again, brand-new skin of this man, a wolf who is no longer dressed like a wolf, who only is one.

Eventually, they will get up off this floor and find out what is left of their lives, with no more curse and no more beast and whatever dwindling magic’s left in their fairy tale. Patrick doesn’t care if Pete moves in with him and Anatoliy, if they rewrite Patrick’s demos together and loiter in studio lobbies with tapes, if they both pull shifts at Round ‘Em Up to make ends meet. He doesn’t care if Pete marches right back into Decaydance being every bit as beastly as before, and a little more ruthless, as long as he does it with Patrick at his side. As long as they curl up in the same bed at night. As long as they wake up overlooking the same kingdom. 

Eventually their story will end. The important thing is, it doesn’t end today. Today it begins.

Far away, up in the mountains, deep in the woods, Andy Hurley feels his curse break. He feels relief like wind through his leaves. He was a man, once, before he rotted to the core with hate. He has been more and he has been less, and now he is free. Only earth is the antidote to magic. Only earth knows how to heal. Rot exists to turn what’s poison into nourishment again. 

So he will walk out into the woods. A scarred oak tree in a stand of cedars, he will send his roots traveling down into the earth. He will harden with weather, with time, and grow taller and prouder and less complicated with the seasons he has left. One day he will wither and begin to die. Mushrooms will climb his trunk til it softens enough that gravity drags him down. He will go gladly to the earth, sighing into the mud, and never know if what he turned to seed will in its turn take root.

This is how a forest lives happily ever after.

Perhaps, in a deep enough forest, tucked into the shadows of _ever after_ , there is a boy with unruly hair who slips between trees in a way most mortals do not. Maybe it’s the leaf and flower he’s been using to get high that’s blurred his edges. Maybe some other richness or enchantment has tangled up in his path. Maybe this boy—we’ll call him Joe—sits down to rest at the base of an oak tree, mottled with mushrooms and musty with age. Maybe Joe will realize there was no tree there last month, let alone such an ancient one; maybe he’ll settle in with no caution at all. After all, autumn is very beautiful. Everything smells of smoke, nothing of fear.

Perhaps something will take root in him as he sits there, a seed of something shimmering and strange. Maybe magic has a way of kissing through your skin where it brushes past you, bruising you with wonder just by proximity. Maybe magic is a leavening agent that quickens in the heat of your blood, til one day it begins to rise.

Perhaps an acorn will fall, and Joe will pick it up without thinking and tuck it into his pocket. If such a thing did come to pass, no one could know if or where he would plant it. No one could predict when such a thing might sprout and begin to grow.

This is the way of fairy tales. Perhaps.


End file.
